City records 1.2pc drop in population as emigration rises

Today’s page 3. SCMP

The figures to note:in the year to end June 2021 almost 90,000 people emigrated from Hong Kong. In the same period almost 14,000 mainlanders immigrated. 

Right-wingers would call that a process of “replacement”. Well, not just right wingers. The students out in the streets, demonstrating and rioting, back in 2019, calling for “freedom and democracy” were also driven by fear of “replacement” as I found at the time. They were worried about mainlanders taking over their jobs, bringing their uncouth habits, smoking in shopping malls, letting their toddlers urinate in the streets, not queueing properly, talking loudly, talking … [shudder] …Mandarin!

It was this fear of mainlandisation that drove the protests. Or, at least, more so than the demands for freedom and democracy. They had their “Five demands; Not one less” (五大诉求，缺一不可 Wu da Suqiu, Que Yi Bu Ke). Initially not a single one of the Five Demands was for universal suffrage. When they realised this was not a good look for freedom and democracy activists, they replaced the fifth Demand — the one demanding our hapless Chief executive Carrie Lam resign — with the Demand for universal suffrage. But all along it was a fear, a nativist fear, that Hong Kong was being overtaken by mainland people and customs. That Hongkongers, Cantonese speakers, were being replaced. How do we know this? Because they said it. Openly. As I noted at the time,  eg here.

And it continues, now exacerbated by the outflow —  more than 6 times the inflow of mainlanders.

Me, I’ve got no issue with it. When I started noticing, a decade or so ago, that there was more Mandarin spoken around me, I was fine with it — I speak the language! I lived in China! The mainland!  But it wasn’t clear to me until 2019 just how much the locals resented mainlanders. Their cousins, after all. I’d had hints of it when I got into some spats with locals over the use of simplified Chinese characters (a mainland thing) vs Traditional characters (a Hong Kong and Taiwan thing).

When I did realise the full extent of the resentment, the vitriolic hatred even, towards mainlanders by locals — some of whom, a shockingly large number of whom had never even been to the mainland (!) — I thought it a kind of racism. Except they’re all Han. So maybe just a kid of bigotry. Certainly a kind of xenophobia. 

What else about a declining population? Will the trend it endure? We don’t know. But seems likely at least to slow growth. Long-term planning has assumed a population upwards of nine million by 2050. That doesn’t seem likely.  How does that affect policies, housing, schooling, environment, etc? I wait and see… 

And that wait will be here in Hong Kong. At least for now; at least as long as there's free access to the internet. If that is censored, then there's Plan B. Having Australia as a Plan B is a pretty good fall-back option....