An influx of mainland Chinese is riling Hong Kong

INSIDE AN AUSTERE room in an industrial building in Hong Kong, a dozen or so middle-aged women, many with small children by their side, arrange chairs in a circle. They are new migrants from mainland China who have come to attend a free Cantonese-language conversation course run by a local NGO. The youngsters, who have recently enrolled at local schools, are already near-fluent. Their parents, however, often find themselves reverting to Mandarin, their mother tongue, when the going gets tough. Each time this happens, the instructor, a native Hong Konger, politely reminds them to stick to Cantonese, even if it makes their children blush.

The border between Hong Kong and mainland China operates much like an international one and mainlanders are not free to enter the city at will. But up to 150 mainland Chinese are allowed to settle in Hong Kong every day under the one-way permit scheme, a programme set up in 1980 that lets mainlanders apply to reunite with relatives in the territory. Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, around 1m mainland Chinese have immigrated to Hong Kong in this way, accounting for 90% of the city’s population growth in recent years. One source of the influx is marriages between mainlanders and locals, which account for a third of all marriages registered in the territory, up from just 7% in 1996.