Mainland China's Tianli Plans a Hong Kong School as Its Gateway to Southeast Asia
The HKEX-listed group, which operates more than 60 schools in mainland China, has applied to open a secondary school in Hung Hom and struck education partnerships across Indonesia, Thailand, and Laos.
Tianli International Holdings Limited, the HKEX-listed education group that operates more than 60 schools across mainland China and serves around 145,000 students, is seeking regulatory approval to open its first Hong Kong campus. The proposed site is in Hung Hom, Kowloon, and is intended for secondary-age students, with the company framing Hong Kong as a strategic staging post for a wider push into Southeast Asia, according to Asia News Network.
The company set out the strategy at a Malaysia-based business forum in early October, where Dr Zhao Feng, Tianli's General Manager of International Education, told delegates that Hong Kong's infrastructure, free-flowing capital, and cultural ties with both the mainland and Southeast Asia made it the natural hub for what the group calls its "Education Going Global" initiative. Tianli has also disclosed partnerships with seven education institutions across Indonesia, Thailand, and Laos, describing them as the beginning of a multinational education network.
The demand case in Hong Kong
Tianli's timing reflects conditions in the Hong Kong market rather than optimism alone. School enrolment in the city rose 12 percent between 2022 and 2025, while the supply of school places grew by only 6 percent. That gap has driven a cluster of new operators into the market this year, including the September 2026 openings of NLCS Hong Kong and YK Pao School, as well as ESF's three new kindergartens. Bloomberg featured Tianli's Hong Kong ambitions in a September 24 analysis of the accelerating entry of elite international school brands into the city.
The group has not begun student recruitment and has stated it will not promote the school publicly until it has obtained all required regulatory approvals and school registration. The curriculum the Hung Hom campus would follow has not been confirmed, leaving open whether it would offer the IB Diploma, a British A Level pathway, or a bilingual programme comparable to what YK Pao School runs in Shanghai and now in Hong Kong.
What this means for the international sector
A mainland-origin operator of Tianli's scale entering the Hong Kong secondary market is a different proposition from the UK-branded campuses that have defined the city's international tier. Where British-curriculum schools in Hong Kong draw from both local affluent families and expatriate postings, Tianli's likely student base could skew heavily toward families with mainland ties, shaping everything from its fee point to its co-curricular offer.
The Southeast Asian partnership network adds a regional dimension that no existing British-curriculum operator has assembled at comparable scale. If Tianli builds a pipeline connecting its mainland schools through Hong Kong into Southeast Asia, it would represent a structurally different kind of competitor for the established international school groups in the region. For now, that remains an ambition; the Hung Hom school itself has yet to receive a licence.