OK here’s me defending Hong Kong against London, Singapore etc on this front. 

One of the reasons why HK worked as a place for Chinese companies to list (before its market’s pricing turned to s***) was that the Chinese were willing to enforce co-cooperation requests from HK’s SFC. This meant that if given a choice between dealing directly with the SFC or to have China’s CSRC knocking on your door and using a HK SFC co-operation request as a pretext to go much further, Chinese companies and executives prefer voluntarily submitting to the HK SFC.

In my trips to Singapore as a financial regulatory lawyer, one complaint I often heard from SGX and MAS contacts was that the co-operation agreements with CSRC were not worth the paper that they were printed on, leaving Singapore regulators with little practical recourse when Singapore-listed Chinese companies and their executives when misconduct occurred. I suspect London might find a similar problem as it seeks to attract more Chinese companies listings - it already had plenty of enforcement problems with Chinese companies listed on London’s AIM.

PS: before you shout “but what about New York”, there are two major differences with London, Singapore etc. First, don’t underestimate the power of shareholder class actions in the US as a de facto enforcement tool. Second and in any event, access to the broadest, deepest capital market in the world is worth most Chinese companies and executives submitting to US regulatory jurisdiction (relatively) voluntarily.