Are Hong Kong's Restless Natives ready for a Browner and Blacker City?
No. We can barely agree if its happening!
No Longer a Cantonese Ethnostate
Did you know that the fastest-growing population in Hong Kong is not mainland Chinese? In fact, they aren’t even Chinese at all—much less East Asian. If you did, you’re probably more observant than most Hong Kong residents.
Believe it or not, the fastest-growing group is Africans, South Asians, and Southeast Asians. In the 2021 census, they accounted for nearly 10% of the population—a sharp rise from 2001. While much of the media obsesses over the decline of White expatriates and the influx of mainland professionals, the future of Hong Kong is set to be significantly browner and blacker.
It’s no secret that we Yellow people aren’t having kids anymore. Vanishingly few of my friends from school or university have children, and those who do aren’t having many.
Hong Kong’s dependence on underpaid, mistreated migrant labor from Southeast Asia has only deepened since the 1970s. These workers—almost always women—have little recourse when abused. They lack political representation, meaningful workplace rights, and institutions willing to defend them. It is now clear that many no longer return to Indonesia or the Philippines when their contracts end or their bodies give out. The women who have raised nearly two generations of Hong Kong children are now having children of their own here—children similarly deprived of rights.
Many of these children speak fluent Cantonese, engage deeply with Hong Kong culture, and contribute to society. Some are even gaining prominence by voicing discontent with the sinocentric yet anglophilic worldview of middle-class Hong Kong. Unlike mainlanders, whose complaints are often dismissed, these young people carry real credibility because they grew up alongside us. They are becoming less invisible—and less deferential—with every passing year.
Hong Kong society, and the government in particular, has no plan for dealing with a homegrown generation of non-Chinese residents who are fluent in our ways and increasingly assertive about their interests. The fact that many lack formal settled status is beside the point. They are residents, if not citizens.
DEPORT?
The Immigration Department could, in theory, deport or denaturalize them—or even ask Beijing to reinterpret the Basic Law to avert a crisis. After all, it has happened before. In 2001, when the Court of Final Appeal ruled that mainland parents of Hong Kong-born children had the right to stay, the Chief Executive went to Beijing. The NPCSC reinterpreted the Basic Law for the first time in history, and the ruling was overturned. The stakes were clear: if every mainland citizen could secure residency through an “anchor baby,” the city’s resources would be overwhelmed. It was a no-brainer.
Hong Kong’s immigration regime is anything but light-touch. Despite the elite’s obsequious attitude toward Beijing, getting in is difficult. It requires marketable skills, a solid university degree, and a viable plan to contribute. Of roughly a million “top talent” visa applications, only 330,000 were approved—and just 220,000 actually arrived last year. Much is made of Hong Kong’s “mainlandization,” but enough bright young mainlanders will admit over a beer that the city was only ever a fallback—Singapore and San Francisco were the real prizes.
Yet when the conversation turns to the rising numbers of Black and Brown people who perform dirty, low-paid jobs and choose to raise their children in the very city that mistreats them daily, the same tired bromides appear: “They’re transients,” “They have no right to permanent residency,” and “We can always send them back.” Hong Kong’s self-satisfied middle class, so quick to mock the West for its decadence, cannot imagine a future in which the state is no longer able to clear them out.
Susie doesn’t even have a pension!
This blind spot persists for an obvious reason. Hong Kong remains remarkably unsentimental toward the Brown and Black women who clean our homes and raise our children. Laws on the books promise dignity and fairness, but the reality for most domestic helpers is anything but.
I was raised by a succession of Filipino women paid a pittance. They worked from sunrise to the early hours, six days a week, and endured routine verbal abuse from adults who should have known better. When my father was dying, Susie—the woman who essentially raised me—slept beside my mother every night. Instead of a proper bed or even a cot, she was given a thin mattress on the floor next to the king-sized bed. She continued this arrangement for months after my father’s death. My mother never acknowledged the sacrifice, even as she lavished praise on her. Did I mention Susie doesn’t have a retirement plan? Believe it or not, the law expects her to die penniless.
Even as Hong Kong families grow ever more dependent on domestic helpers, we still treat them as fundamentally separate from us. Few parents pause to question whether it’s fair to demand a full home-cooked meal of steamed fish and kangkong on a maid’s only day off. Even fewer ask whether forcing them to live in already cramped apartments is reasonable.
What the fuck should we do then?
One day, Hong Kong people will have to accept that the Black and Brown residents among us can no longer be considered apart from us. Once we acknowledge that most will not remigrate—because we refuse to grant them status or a genuine sense of belonging—we will need a real national conversation about what it means to be a Hong Kong person. The national pastime of complaining about colonial legacies and excessive welfare spending won’t get us there.
Nice piece