The Language the Money Speaks
- 18 hours ago
- 5 min read
Steven Wong is a Legal English Consultant and Textbook Writer with 15 published books. He is currently working on his novel about HK post 1997.
A loan agreement crosses a desk in Central. It runs to ninety pages. Every clause from “conditions precedent,” “representations and warranties,” to “events of default” is in English, though the borrower’s accountant reads Chinese more comfortably than either language of law. Nobody in the room finds this strange. This is how Hong Kong finance has worked for over a century, and the arrangement has made the city rich. It has also left cracks that are starting to show.
A common law city in a Cantonese harbour
Hong Kong runs on common law, and common law runs on precedent. Judgments from London, Singapore, and Hong Kong’s own courts stack up in English, decade after decade, until a term like “indemnify” or “best endeavours” carries a settled weight that no translation fully replicates. A lawyer drafting an International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) master agreement in Hong Kong isn’t starting from scratch. She’s borrowing two hundred years of argument, and the currency of that borrowing is English.
This is the advantage in a sentence: Hong Kong sells legal predictability, and English is the language predictability comes packaged in. International banks list on the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) in English. Syndicated loans are papered in English. Arbitration at the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC) runs in English by default. A fund manager in Frankfurt doesn’t need to underwrite translation risk on top of market risk because he already trusts the words on the page, because they’re the same words his own lawyers use. That trust is not free. It has to be maintained, and that's where the difficulty starts.
The advantage also has a talent dimension, easy to overlook because it operates quietly in the background. English-medium legal training lets Hong Kong draw on a global pool of common-law-qualified professionals: solicitors trained in London, barristers who cut their teeth in Sydney, and in-house counsel moving between Hong Kong and New York without needing to relearn an entire legal vocabulary. That mobility runs both ways. Hong Kong exports its own lawyers into the same international market, and the city’s reputation travels with them. None of this works in a jurisdiction where the governing legal language is a barrier rather than a bridge.
The quiet cost of two languages
Walk the arrangement forward to a smaller transaction. For example, a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) loan, a retail bond, a mortgage refinancing for a family business in Sha Tin. The Official Languages Ordinance requires bilingual legislation, and firms typically prepare Chinese-language terms alongside the English original. But equivalence between the two is a promise, not a fact. Common law concepts don’t always have a Chinese legal term with the same scope, and when the English and Chinese texts of an ordinance diverge even slightly, someone eventually has to litigate which version controls.
Meanwhile, the retail investor holds two documents they can’t quite reconcile. They sign the one in their own language and hope it matches the one that actually governs the deal. This is not a hypothetical asymmetry. It is baked into the system every time a prospectus or terms sheet is issued bilingually, with English carrying the legal weight but with Chinese carrying the comprehension.
Financial regulators know this. The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) requires disclosure documents aimed at the retail public to carry Chinese translations, and banks train frontline staff to walk clients through terms verbally before signature. These are real safeguards. But a verbal walkthrough is not the same as reading the governing text yourself, understanding exactly what you agreed to, and knowing everyone in the room does.
There is also a simple cost in money and time. Dual-language drafting, certified translation, and bilingual review before filing all require funding, and none of it scales down gracefully. A multinational bank absorbs the cost without noticing. A small trading company negotiating its first facility agreement feels every dollar.
Three things keeping lawyers up at night
Ask a Hong Kong solicitor what worries her about the next decade, and three answers come up more than any others. The first is proficiency. English standards among younger cohorts have been sliding for years, according to teachers and law faculty who watch the pipeline closely. A financial centre that runs on precise English drafting needs a steady supply of people who can write it precisely. That supply is not guaranteed.
The second is the pull of the Mainland. As Greater Bay Area business and Stock Connect volumes grow, more deals are structured for mainland counterparties, mainland regulators, and mainland courts. Chinese-medium contracting edges into spaces English used to hold by default. This is not dramatic, and it is not sudden. It’s closer to a shoreline receding a few inches a year, noticeable only in the accumulation.
The third is people. Since 2020, Hong Kong has watched a meaningful slice of its bilingual professional class leave for Britain, Canada, and Australia. Every departure takes years of trained judgment out of the local pool at precisely the moment Singapore is spending heavily to attract the same talent with the same pitch: English-language, common-law, internationally recognised. Hong Kong is no longer just competing for capital. It’s competing for the people who can write the sentence that makes capital feel safe.
Underneath all three sits something harder to name but easy to feel: confidence in the courts. English-language contracts only mean what everyone assumes they mean if the judiciary interpreting them is trusted to be independent and consistent. Any doubt on that front doesn’t stay contained to politics. It travels straight into how much weight a New York fund gives a Hong Kong-governed agreement, and from there into pricing, deal volume, and where the next IPO gets listed.
What shows up in the numbers
None of this is abstract for long. It shows up in listing decisions, whether a company chooses Hong Kong or Singapore for its IPO. It shows up in arbitration seat selection, where clients increasingly have a genuine choice between HKIAC and the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC), and pick based on more than habit. It also shows up in fund domicile decisions, where lawyers weigh legal certainty against cost and speed.
For now, Hong Kong still holds the advantage that matters most: it is where Chinese and international capital can meet within a single, legible legal vocabulary. That vocabulary is English, wrapped in common law, backed by a judiciary that international parties have trusted for decades. This is not a small thing. It is the entire basis of the city’s financial identity.
However, it is a maintained advantage, not an inherited one. English proficiency has to be taught, not assumed. Judicial predictability has to be protected, not advertised. Bilingual talent has to be trained faster than it leaves. Singapore understood this and built an entire strategy around offering the same legal legibility, with less uncertainty attached. Hong Kong doesn’t get to coast on a hundred years of precedent while a competitor a few time zones south spends every year sharpening the same pitch.
The ninety-page loan agreement will still be drafted in English next year, and the year after that. The real question is whether the person reading it, whether in London, Singapore, or Shanghai, still trusts, without a second thought, that the words mean exactly what they say.
Read more from Wai CS Wong
Wai CS Wong, Legal English Consultant & Textbook Writer
Steven is bilingual and bicultural. Arrived in UK at aged 4, grew up working in his father's hospitality business, attended university in Scotland and also a second degree in HK. He has worked in several countries, including the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong, China. Although retired, he continues to consult on Legal English and write Common Error textbooks for the HK, Taiwanese, and Middle Eastern markets.
