Quote:Hong Kong's population must grow for the city to be competitive, and Chief Executive Donald Tsang thinks 10 million people could live here comfortably -- an increase of over 40 percent, the Financial Times said on Friday.

The former British colony on China's southern coast is home to just under 7 million people and it already boasts some of the most densely populated areas on earth.

"We must not allow the population to age and then shrink. We must grow in order to be competitive," Tsang told the newspaper in an interview published on Friday.

"We have the fundamentals, like New York and London, to create a global financial centre and a reasonably good living for 10 million people here."

Hong Kong needed to boost immigration and education, and invest in infrastructure, Tsang said.

The Asian financial hub returned to Chinese rule in July 1997, and less than two years later Beijing, which has ultimate say over the city's affairs, ruled that children of parents with the right of abode in Hong Kong did not enjoy the same right.

Had the Chinese parliament not weighed in on the issue, hundreds of thousands of people living in China would have been eligible to come to Hong Kong.

Currently, the city accepts 150 immigrants from mainland China per day. It has a low fertility rate, and Tsang told the newspaper he would be happy to see Hong Kong's population maintained at 7-7.5 million by the end of his term in five years.

In addition to population growth, Tsang said Hong Kong needed to "move up the governance scale so that we are in the same rank as New York and London, distancing ourselves completely from the likes of Singapore or Shanghai or everybody else where they are still very much a territorial market".

Singapore this year announced plans to raise its population by a similar percentage over the next decade to 6.5 million, it said.