The recent summit gives top Western bankers a largely scripted update on the Chinese economy.

Top Chinese government officials attended Hong Kong’s flagship banking summit on November 19 and made it clear: They see a key role for the financial center in connecting mainland companies and the international market.

Top executives of global banks, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS, as well as private investors like Capital Group and Apollo Global Management, are among 100 guests attending the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s three-day investment summit.

In a 15-minute speech, Chinese vice premier He Lifeng said China would support more listings and sovereign bond issuances in Hong Kong, and that more Chinese financial institutions should put down roots in the city. He also mentioned supporting the buildout of Hong Kong’s digital economy and family offices.

Hong Kong should be a critical conduit for channeling capital to facilitate China’s Belt and Road Initiative for global infrastructure, He added.

Following He, three more top mainland financial regulators took turns speaking on a panel. They largely stuck with prepared remarks, with a heavy emphasis on China’s recent stimulus packages. They stressed that Hong Kong should better reflect China’s development, with one calling for a bigger presence of Chinese companies in the city.

While the summit, the third of its kind, is mainly seen as an effort to court Western capital, it offers global financial leaders a window on China’s economic policy and could help them understand where Hong Kong fits in.

Battered by three years of stock market underperformance, Hong Kong’s capital markets have only recently seen some signs of relief, with new IPOs raising bigger sums in the first three quarters compared with the same period last year.

The benchmark Hang Seng Index has also rallied as mainland authorities rolled out stimulus measures starting in late September, although much of the gains have been erased by concerns that Donald Trump’s return as US president could undermine China’s economic policy.

Li Yunze, minister of China’s National Financial Regulatory Administration, told the conference that Beijing supports Chinese banks and insurance companies setting up offshore headquarters in Hong Kong, and that more insurance companies should issue bonds in Hong Kong. The government is also encouraging Chinese banks to participate in building up Hong Kong as a gold trading center.

“Hong Kong’s fate has always been closely linked to China’s,” Li said on stage.

With investors eyeing the effect of Beijing’s stimulus efforts as a factor in whether to put money back into China, the speakers painted an optimistic picture. Zhu Hexin, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China and director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said regulators have observed new homebuyers becoming more active, which would be a hopeful sign given the country’s protracted property downturn.

As for Hong Kong, he said regulators will continue to support the city as an offshore center for the yuan and will seek to “optimize” the Connect programs that are crucial for offshore investors to access China’s stock markets.

Some Western investors said that they appreciated the officials’ in-person briefings on China’s economy, but that they were still inclined to wait and see.

A senior Asia executive for a European asset manager who was participating in the summit for the second time said He’s appearance, in particular, was “helpful for closing the gap” between foreign investors’ understanding of China and the perspective of Chinese regulators. “But they could be more loose, since they are mostly reading from scripts,” the executive added.

David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, said investors are still hoping to see improvement in consumption in China, while harboring concerns about the difficulty of pulling money out of China.

“I think you’ve got a combination of issues that have global investors predominantly on the sidelines, with respect to capital deployment, foreign direct investment into China,” Solomon said. “One of the things they continue to be concerned about is they put a lot of capital in, and it’s been very difficult over the course of the last five years to get capital out.”

Ted Pick, CEO of Morgan Stanley, said he agreed with Solomon. “Transparency is important, and battling deflation takes time.” Consumer confidence is “the name of the game here,” he said. “But we’re seeing some green shoots.”

In a separate news conference on November 18 by Swedish private equity firm EQT, Sueann Yeo, the firm’s head of private wealth and client relations for the Asia Pacific, said there were no immediate plans to increase allocations to China. “While there are a lot of attractive opportunities, the exit horizon for us is uncertain, and the geopolitics does contribute to the uncertainty,” Yeo said. Even so, EQT is still hoping to attract Chinese clients.

November 19’s main event was held the same day as a Hong Kong court handed down prison sentences to democracy campaigners in the city’s largest national security trial. Some rights groups called on Wall Street bankers to boycott the summit in protest.

One banker who attended the summit said the corporate communications departments of Western banks would surely make the participating executives aware of the sentencing, “because the juxtaposition is pretty glaring.”

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