Reality Check on "Ethnic Cleansing"

Fewer mainlanders are immigrating to Hong Kong each day

The same day Hong Kong National Party convenor Andy Chan Ho-tin spoke at the Foreign Correspondents Club yesterday, decrying China was performing "ethnic cleansing" in the city by having 150 mainlanders move here everyday, the statistics show otherwise.

According to figures released by the Census and Statistics Department on Tuesday, some 41,000 mainlanders moved to Hong Kong in the past 12 months ending on June 30, which is a drop of 14,700 compared to a year ago. It is the biggest drop in a decade.

The last steep decline was from 2005-06 and 2006-07 when the number fell by 14,900 to 44,700.

The one-way permit scheme allows spouses and children born across the border to be reunited with their families in Hong Kong.

Andy Chan claimed China was doing "ethnic cleansing"

Paul Yip Siu-fai, chair professor of population health at the University of Hong Kong, says it could be due to several factors, but one possibility could be the city becoming less desirable from before.

"For married couples that want their kids to come to Hong Kong, it must mean that the city has something better to offer to them," Yip said.

"But it's become more expensive to live here, especially housing, so it is worth looking into whether people are less willing to come because Hong Kong is less attractive to them," he said.

Anti-mainland sentiment is another possible factor deterring mainlanders from settling here, with the lowest number of people using the one-way permit scheme totaling 34,000 from mid-2013 and mid-2014, just before the Occupy protests.

Sze Lai-shan, a veteran social worker from the Society for Community Organization who helps new immigrant families settle in Hong Kong, said some mainlanders might not be as eager to move to the city, in part because of the improved living standards across the border. 

"It is especially the case for Hong Kong women getting married to mainland men. The husband won't want to come to Hong Kong. Usually the Hong Kong wife will go settle in the mainland," Sze said.

Accumulated there are over 800K mainlanders in Hong Kong

This is the trend Marion Chan Shui-yu, deputy commissioner for census and statistics is seeing. Such partnerships rose from 19 percent of all cross-border marriages in 1996 to 33 percent in 2016. In an interesting twist, the number of mainland women marrying Hong Kong men in cross-border marriages dropped from 81 percent to 66.7 percent in the same period.

It used to be that mainland women would marry much older Hong Kong men in the hopes of hitting the jackpot, but now it seems they have wised up after hearing many stories that not every Hong Kong man is rich. There are also many financial problems once the women and children move to the city -- the women cannot work right away and even then they are typically not well educated and can only find low-paying jobs.

So while there may be fewer mainlanders moving to Hong Kong each year, they are accumulating. There are over 800,000 since 2004, it's not a small number -- and growing.