HONG KONG: A major Asia-focused tech conference announced Thursday it is ditching Hong Kong in favour of Malaysia in a fresh blow to the Chinese financial hub's push to attract tech talent. The annual RISE Conference brings together CEOs, startups and investors and has been held in Hong Kong over the last five years.

But organisers said they would move their annual conference to Kuala Lumpur in 2022.

"Hosting RISE in Kuala Lumpur is going to expand the event into an exciting region of Southeast Asia," Casey Lau, co-host of RISE said in a statement.

The decision comes as major tech firms fret over the accelerating crackdown by Beijing on dissent in Hong Kong after last year's huge and sometimes violent democracy protests. In June, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law that grants authorities significant powers to access company servers and networks.

The crackdown prompted the United States to declare Hong Kong no longer sufficiently autonomous from authoritarian China, which blocks access to many of the world's top tech companies.