Lam Hang-chi was born in Chenghai, Guangdong, in 1940 under the name Lam Shan-muk, and also wrote under the pen name Sze Wai-tak. A Hong Kong writer and economic commentator, he entered journalism in the 1960s, working at Ming Pao and rising to deputy editor-in-chief of the Ming Pao Evening News in charge of its economics pages, before studying economics at the Cambridgeshire College of Technology in Britain; he returned to Hong Kong in 1969. In 1973 he founded the Hong Kong Economic Journal with his wife Lok Yau-mui and the journalist Law Chi-ping, the city's first professional Chinese-language financial newspaper, and from that day wrote its daily editorial, Short Comments on Politics and Economics, for twenty-four years, analysing stocks, exchange rates, interest rates and the international political economy and explaining Chicago School and Keynesian economics to readers in plain written Cantonese. He launched the HKEJ Monthly in 1977. His subjects ranged widely, from the local stock market to Sino-American relations and from the oil crisis to the Asian financial crisis, and he was also fond of travel and cultural study, often filling his column with travel writing and observations on historic sights. His independent, rational stance earned him the long-standing nickname 'Hong Kong's finest pen', and over the years his editorials and columns were collected into more than a hundred books, totalling over twenty million words. In 2014 he sold his entire stake in the paper but kept writing the Lam Hang-chi Column until he announced his retirement in July 2021. He died, surrounded by his family, on 6 September 2026, aged 86.
Through the Hong Kong Economic Journal's editorials and his column, Lam brought rigorous economic analysis into Chinese-language journalism, making financial commentary part of public debate; the title 'Hong Kong's finest pen' stood for nearly half a century.
Achievements
- 1973 · Co-founded the Hong Kong Economic Journal, the city's first professional Chinese-language financial newspaper, and began its daily editorial.
- 1977 · Launched the Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly.
- 2021 · Announced his retirement, ending the long-running Lam Hang-chi Column.