Hong Kong Exodus (Part 2)
#11 in the Hong Kong Repression Monitor series
The Hong Kong Repression Monitor series provides overviews of indicators of repression in Hong Kong, based on research and data collected from 2019 to the present. For more information, see the introduction, which also has a full list of entries in the series as they are published.
This article is #11 in the Hong Kong Repression Monitor series. It is the second of two parts on the Hong Kong Exodus. The first part looked at those who have fled Hong Kong due to political persecution directly targeting them. This part focuses specifically on the mass emigration of hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers in the past five years: Exactly how many have left? Where have they gone? Why did they leave? And how has the mass emigration impacted Hong Kong?
As noted in Part 1, mass emigration from a prosperous, well-developed society that is not at war is rare, and the phenomenon is an indicator of the extent of the calamity that has befallen Hong Kong.
How many people have left? Where have they gone?
It’s not that hard to get a rough idea of the number of people who have emigrated from Hong Kong in the past five years, but it’s quite hard to determine the exact number or even something a bit more precise.
The United Kingdom
The best place to start is the United Kingdom’s British National (Overseas) Visa Scheme. Enacted on January 31, 2021, it is far and away the number one route Hong Kongers have taken. The UK government adopted the measure in direct response to the Chinese Communist Party’s imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong in June 2020. The visa scheme is the most significant single act of any foreign government vis-a-vis the cataclysmic crackdown in Hong Kong. The UK government estimates that 2.9 million Hong Kongers hold BNO passports, on top of which an estimated 2.5 million of their dependents are also eligible—that’s 5.4 million in all, out of a population of about 7.5 million. The BN(O) visa allows the holder to reside and work in the UK for five years, after which the holder is eligible to apply for settlement and, after twelve months, for citizenship.
As of the end of 2024, the UK government reports that there have been 182,652 out of country visa applications, 176,714 out of country visas have been granted, and 161,200 people have arrived in the UK. On top of that, 43,205 in-country extensions have been granted; that means Hong Kongers already in the UK under some other immigration status have decided to hop on the track to citizenship. In all, then, 219,919 Hong Kongers have been granted the BN(O) visa and 204,405 are residing in the UK. This represents by far the largest contingent of the new diaspora created in the last five years.
The fact that so many Hong Kongers have gone to live in the UK is all the more astounding given that the UK’s economy is hardly the most dynamic in the world. Many Hong Kongers who decide to emigrate to the UK do so in the knowledge that their earning power there may be significantly lower than in Hong Kong. That is yet another sign of just how extraordinary this exodus is: where else in the world do migrants leave their home in large numbers and go to another country in the knowledge that the move could very well prove less financially advantageous than remaining at home? Things have to be pretty bad at home for people to even consider uprooting themselves and their families.
After an initial huge response to the BN(O) visa scheme, the numbers have dropped significantly in the past two years. This is a sign that those who really wanted to get out got out fast, and now reduced numbers steadily continue to depart. Whereas in the first two years of the scheme, 135,289 people applied from out of country, in the past two years, there have been 48,205 applications. In 2023, 35,000 arrived in the UK; in 2024, 20,700. It is not unrealistic to expect that in the next five years, there will be around 20,000 arrivals a year. That would mean 100,000 more Hong Kongers in the UK and take the overall number who are there through the BN(O) visa scheme to more than 300,000.
In addition to that very large number of Hong Kongers who have taken the BN(O) route, there are also the 63 who have been granted asylum there (out of the 332 who have applied; 112 were rejected and 90 applications were withdrawn).
In contrast to the UK, accurate numbers of Hong Kongers intending to immigrate are harder to come by in the cases of Canada, Taiwan and Australia, the other main countries to which Hong Kongers have immigrated.
Canada
After the UK, the next largest number of Hong Kongers has gone to Canada.
In June 2021, the Canadian government put in place a new policy known as Hong Kong Permanent Residence Pathways. As with the BN(O) visa, this policy was a response to the imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong. As of October 31, 2024, 26,500 have applied for permanent residency through the pathways; 10,500 have been granted PR, and fewer than 200 have been refused. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the Canadian governmental agency in charge of immigration, admits there is a backlog in processing applications and expects that most applications will be processed after 2027. (!!!!!)
There are basically two pathways in the HK PR Pathways scheme. One is through having gone to university in Canada and the other is through having worked in Canada. This makes it significantly different from the BN(O) scheme which requires no previous work, study or residence in the UK. In order to enable more Hong Kongers to avail themselves of that second pathway, referred to as Stream B, having to do with Canadian work experience, in 2021 the Canadian government also introduced a so-called “lifeboat” open work permit scheme for recent Hong Kong graduates so as to enable them to get the work experience needed to be eligible for the so-called Stream B pathway. After a little more than three years, that scheme just ended in February 2025, and IRCC reported the program received more than 49,000 applications as of December 31, 2024, and more than 40,500 had been approved.
Not all of those 40,500 Hong Kongers who had their open work permit applications approved necessarily intend to settle in Canada and even many who may be considering that may not end up applying for permanent residency, but if we take the programs the Canadian government has put in place specifically for Hong Kongers that can lead to permanent residency, then in all 51,000 Hong Kongers have taken advantage of them so far.
Taiwan
The number of Hong Kongers who have moved to Taiwan rivals the number who have gone to Canada. Taiwan has implemented no new immigration programs specific to Hong Kongers since 2020, so Hong Kongers have had to make do with applying for temporary residence permits and—for those who are eligible—permanent residency permits.
In 2020 and 2021, the number of Hong Kongers receiving temporary residency permits annually pretty much doubled on previous years. In 2019, 5,858 Hong Kongers received temporary residency permits; in 2020, 10,813; and in 2021, 11,173. Since then, the numbers have fallen steadily back to pre-2020 levels: 8,945 in 2022; 6,625 in 2023; and 5,368 in 2024. Meanwhile, from 2020 to 2024, 7,756 Hong Kongers received permanent residency. So, altogether, from 2020 to 2024, 50,680 Hong Kongers moved to Taiwan. While the temporary residence permits are not an automatic pathway to permanent residency, much anecdotal evidence and a general familiarity with the Hong Kong diaspora in Taiwan suggest that many Hong Kongers who have gone to Taiwan since 2020 did so with the intention of staying there.
Hong Kongers were initially attracted to Taiwan as a place to move to after 2020 because of its cultural and geographical proximity as well as the supportive and welcoming signals from the Taiwan government. But Hong Kongers’ actual reported experience in Taiwan has been mixed. It seems the Taiwan government had second thoughts about encouraging Hong Kongers to come, for fear of provoking the CCP and of the CCP using immigration from Hong Kong as an opportunity for infiltration. Hong Kongers report experiencing many bureaucratic barriers. Some have left Taiwan for the UK, and not as many as before think of Taiwan as a good place to permanently settle.
Australia
The other country to which a significant number of Hong Kongers have immigrated since 2020 is Australia. Like Canada, Australia introduced two new pathways to permanent residency for Hong Kongers in 2021 in response to the political situation in Hong Kong. Both pathways require Hong Kongers to have already have resided and/or worked in Australia for at least four years, and since, unlike Canada, no open work permit scheme was added to the mix, no Hong Kongers have been able to come directly from Hong Kong to Australia to avail themselves immediately of the schemes. For that reason, the response to the pathways provided specifically for Hong Kongers has been small: from March 2022 to February 2023, 370 people were approved, and from March 2023 to February 2024, 680 people, for a total of 1,050 in the first two years of the scheme. (As yet, no statistics appear to be available for 2024-2025.)
Australia was a primary immigration destination of Hong Kongers before the crackdown began as well, but the numbers have shot up since. Pre-2020, about 1,300 to 1,800 Hong Kongers received permanent residency permits in Australia per year. From mid-2020, for the next two fiscal years, the number climbed to about 4,200 per year. It’s tapered since mid-2022, but overall, from mid-2020 to mid-2024, 14,551 Hong Kongers have received permanent residency through the normal routes open to all foreign nationals (ie, in addition to the Hong Kong-specific routes outlined above). Most of these would not have been recent arrivals in Australia.
Meanwhile, the highest number of Hong Kongers have applied for asylum in Australia out of any country—a total of 582 from 2019 to 2024—but only five have been approved, while 54 have been refused, and 61 withdrew their applications. That leaves 462 applications pending. (See “Hong Kong Exodus Part 1” for details.)
What does appear to have occurred as a result of the introduction of the Hong Kong-specific pathways is that the number of Hong Kongers receiving study visas in Australia has increased, as has the average age of those applying, and they seem to be going to Australia to study so as to get on the pathway to permanent residency. This means that the annual number of Hong Kongers becoming permanent residents in Australia could increase in the coming years.
Overall, what we can say is that 15,601 Hong Kongers have received permanent residency permits in Australia in the past five years.
Some Hong Kongers have gone to other countries as well, including the United States, Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand. But the numbers appear so small as to not significantly impact the overall number of Hong Kongers who have emigrated—perhaps a couple thousand at most. For that reason, I have simply added the number of Hong Kongers known to have been granted asylum in those countries to the overall count below.
(The US should have been part of the Hong Kong mass emigration equation. Countries like the UK, Canada and Australia which implemented policies intended to make it easier for Hong Kongers to reach their shores and stay did so partly out of solidarity with Hong Kongers at a moment of crisis and partly out of self-interest: Hong Kong immigrants tend to be well-educated, highly-skilled, English-speaking and committed to the shared values of freedom and democracy. Those governments all see immigration from Hong Kong as a net gain for their societies and see Hong Kongers as relatively easily assimilable immigrants. Similar Hong Kong immigration bills were introduced in Congress in the years following 2019, and one, the Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Act, came a whisker away from becoming law, with bipartisan support, until at the last moment, when Senators tried to pass it by a procedure known as unanimous consent, one single Senator stood up and blocked it, erstwhile Hong Konger-supporting freedom fighter Ted Cruz, on spurious grounds that it could lead to CCP infiltration—as could, presumably, all Chinese immigration, which is why the US government has safeguards in place to vet it. [Or, to put it differently, if CCP infiltration is a major concern, it already has opportunities to do that via existing routes, and an extra Hong Kong route would not significantly increase its chances of succeeding.] As it stands, all the US has is Biden’s Deferred Enforced Departure order, which was only meant as a stopgap until a more durable solution could be found, is estimated to affect anywhere from 3,680 to 9,300 Hong Kongers already residing in the US—the former figure is probably more accurate—, and is the exact opposite of a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship—it only says we won’t deport any Hong Kongers who have overstayed their visas as long as the order is in force. All in all, a poor showing from a country that could and should have been among those that helped the most.)
From the above, the following can be calculated:
That means that at least 337,544 have left Hong Kong with the intention of permanently settling in another country in the past five years.
Hong Kong’s population was 7,481,800 in 2020. About 4.5 percent of that population has emigrated since then—nearly one in every 20 people.
Why have they left?
Most Hong Kong people who have emigrated left because they cannot tolerate the transformation of their home into an authoritarian society. They see Hong Kong as a place of no hope. They must go elsewhere to make a future for themselves and, in particular, for their children. Many of those who have immigrated to the United Kingdom are middle-class families with school-age children. Many young people have also left, seeing no future for themselves in Hong Kong. As one 23-year-old recent graduate said at the airport while waiting to board a plane to London, “I don’t seem to see any hope in [Hong Kong.] If I have the chance, I would like to make a life elsewhere and contribute to Hong Kong when I have the ability.”
Essentially, the CCP’s direct control of Hong Kong, its stripping of Hong Kong’s autonomy and the elements of democracy that existed, the crackdown on human rights, and the decreasing freedom all go against the values of most Hong Kongers, leaving them faced with a dilemma: stay in their home which they no longer recognize and feel deeply alienated from, or set out into the unknown.
Of course, migration is deeply embedded in the culture of Hong Kongers. Most Hong Kongers are descendants of people who came from China within the last one hundred years. That is to say, Hong Kong is an immigrant society par excellence: almost everyone came from somewhere else (China) in recent memory. And Hong Kongers also have long experience of leaving Hong Kong and going elsewhere for opportunities.
This isn’t even the first recent mass emigration Hong Kong has experienced. From 1984, when the Joint Sino-British Declaration agreeing the handover of Hong Kong was signed, Hong Kongers started thinking about placing their bets elsewhere. Emigration numbers spiked in the years after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, especially from 1989 to 1994. During that period, several hundred thousand people left—comparable numbers to what we’re seeing now. An estimated 503,800 Hong Kongers left between 1987 and 1996. We haven’t yet reached that number this time around.
But back then, a large number of those who left were upper middle class and wealthy people who left for business rather than political reasons. They feared that after the CCP took control of Hong Kong, capitalism would end or, at any rate, business opportunities would significantly decrease. Of course, that proved not to be the case, and in fact, after 1997, when they saw little change in Hong Kong’s business environment, many returned, this time with foreign passports. There’s always been a significant portion of Hong Kongers that have lived with a foot in Hong Kong and another elsewhere, either Hong Kong and China or Hong Kong and some Western country, and in recent decades, having a foot in a Western country was seen as a kind of insurance policy.
What’s different now is that most people are leaving for political reasons. Most are not committed pro-democracy activists who find themselves at high risk of persecution. Rather, they love Hong Kong and they hate to see it destroyed by the CCP. They value freedom, democracy, human rights, and have a live-and-let-live attitude—they want to live in an open society, they want to look toward the future and see it as bright, full of possibilities and opportunities. They see all that being taken away, they see their home being stolen from them.
If you don’t believe me, survey after survey after survey after survey after survey after survey of people still living in Hong Kong shows this: anywhere from 30 to 45 percent of Hong Kongers say they would like to emigrate or would emigrate if they had the chance; 25 to 40 percent say they have definite plans to do so in the near future. The numbers of professionals and young people considering leaving are even higher. Most commonly cited reasons to emigrate include the undemocratic political system, political instability and the generally poor political environment were top reasons cited, along with the poor economy and the poor living environment. In a survey of Hong Kongers who recently immigrated to the UK, 98 percent cited judicial independence, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and confidence in government as crucial factors for leaving Hong Kong.
How has Hong Kong been affected by the mass emigration?
When close to one in every 20 people leaves a city, it affects everyone. Nearly everyone knows someone who’s left. It affects nearly every neighborhood, every school, every class, every work place, every family and every circle of friends. It is the issue constantly hanging in the air.
One group that has been especially impacted is elderly people. One study showed 47 percent of respondents had children who’d emigrated in the past three years; another, 37 percent. As a result of mass emigration, there are many more older people living in Hong Kong without the support of their families, and many more families split up, with loved ones living not just in the next city or the next state or even the next country but on the other side of the world.
There have been numerous reports in recent years of large numbers of teachers,1 students,2 doctors,3 nurses,4 social workers,5 journalists,6 lawyers,7 and university professors8 as well as civil servants9 and even millionaires10 leaving.
According to Hong Kong government census statistics, from 2018 to 2022, the size of the labor force contracted from 3,996,800 to 3,776,300, a loss of 220,500 workers—5.5 percent of the work force. Many sectors of the economy haven’t had enough workers, and there are frequent media reports about various schemes devised to import workers (more on that below). (By 2023, the size of the labor force expanded—to 3,882,300, largely due to a combination of importation of workers and levelling off of mass emigration.)11
Hong Kong over the past five years has experienced demographic decline, brain drain and capital flight.
Even before 2019, Hong Kong had the lowest birthrate in the world. On top of that, it saw a 40-percent decline in newborns from 2019 to 2022 due to a combination of poor living conditions, an authoritarian educational system, dismal economic outlook and political repression.
In the 2025 World Happiness Report, Hong Kong received its lowest-ever ranking of 88th in the world, putting it in the company of Algeria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Armenia, Albania, Tajikistan, Georgia and Nepal, and far behind its most frequently cited East Asian competitors: Taiwan was 27th, Singapore 34th, Japan 55th, South Korea 58th, and China 68th.
The Hong Kong government has stepped up campaigns to import foreign workers and woo foreign investors. In particular, it has sought to import doctors, nurses, aviation workers, construction workers, and bus drivers as well as, more generally, the well-educated and rich.
But the only people who are eager to move to Hong Kong are Chinese, and even many of those, especially the best educated and most prosperous, aren’t even interested in sticking around Hong Kong as maybe they once were, but instead are using it as a stepping stone to a more stable place with a better economic outlook. The Chinese elite who used to park their assets in Hong Kong are now looking elsewhere too: stripped of its autonomy, Hong Kong is no longer regarded as a safe haven for gains whether ill-gotten or otherwise.
The Hong Kong government’s main campaign to attract the well-educated and wealthy is the Top Talent scheme. While ostensibly open to anyone in the world, so far, 95 percent of approved applicants have been from China.
Over the next 25 years, the Hong Kong government projects that the current population, hovering around 7.5 million, will grow to 8.19 million. Almost all of that growth will come from Chinese immigration. Deaths are expected to outpace births by 860,000. Of the 1.52 million immigrants expected, 890,000 will be one-way permit holders from China. The One-way Permit Scheme is supposedly intended to reunite families, but it is controlled and administered by the Ministry of Public Security in China and how it selects its beneficiaries is almost entirely opaque. In general, people who come via the scheme appear to have lower incomes and be less educated. 390,000 others are expected to arrive via Top Talent and other labor and capital recruitment programs, again overwhelmingly from China. The only significant category of immigration expected that is not from China is that of “foreign domestic workers”—240,000 of them, up to now mostly women from the Philippines and Indonesia, but to even categorize this group under immigration is dubious as they receive fixed-term visas directly related to their employment which cannot under any circumstances lead to permanent residency.
While Top Talent and other schemes are new initiatives in response to mass emigration, the overall demographic trend remains what it has been for decades: From 1997 to 2024, 1,225,500 Chinese immigrated to Hong Kong via the one-way permit scheme—about 16 percent of Hong Kong’s overall current population. If you add to that the 890,000 expected, in 25 years, at least 26 percent of Hong Kong’s population will be made up of people immigrating from China since the handover, and that number will be even higher if those arriving via other schemes besides OWS are included.
This demographic trend is similar to what has been seen in Tibet and the Uyghur homelands—“settler colonialism.” Of course, most Hong Kongers prior to the 1997 handover arrived from China as well, but the perception of arrivals from China in recent decades is that they do not necessarily share the values of Hong Kongers in regard to freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law, and the general principles of an open society. Not only that, but they have arrived in such large numbers that rather than assimilating to the majority culture in Hong Kong, they instead are changing that culture to become more like the one they brought with them; this is especially the case as so many Hong Kongers leave. At the same time, as the Hong Kong government has become full-blown authoritarian, the education system has become more authoritarian, and the media has become ever more censored, there are ever fewer forces in society promoting what are regarded as the traditional values of Hong Kongers mentioned above.
An elderly friend who recently emigrated to the UK returned to Hong Kong for a visit. She stayed with her son, who still lives in the subsidized public housing flat where she used to live. She said Hong Kong feels like a totally different place to her. Part of it has to do with the political atmosphere, but it was also that the amount of Mandarin she heard spoken on her housing estate had increased greatly. Few Hong Kongers harbor animosity toward Chinese people as individuals, but most are deeply amibivalent about the immigration trend and deplore the fact that Hong Kongers themselves have essentially zero control over it.
More broadly, trends like this make Hong Kongers despair that they will ever recover what has been lost: we’ve passed the point of no return. And it brings into question what and where “Hong Kong” is. Have the hundreds of thousands of emigrants brought the “real Hong Kong” with them, preserving, cultivating and developing it in the diaspora, or are they despite their large numbers vis-a-vis Hong Kong’s overall population still little more than a drop in the bucket in the wide world out there and they will mostly eventually assimilate into their host societies, like so much water trickling into the sand? Have those who have left done the “real Hong Kong” a service or a disservice: are they in the vanguard of fostering that real Hong Kong, or did they abandon their home to forces that will stamp it out there without themselves really making much of an impact abroad? Can a modicum of the “real Hong Kong” be preserved in Hong Kong and withstand the powerful political and demographic forces swiftly eroding it? The answers to all of these questions remain to be seen, and the fate of Hong Kong hangs in the balance.
The school years 2020-21 and 2021-22 saw the biggest number of departures. In that period, a total of 11,820 teachers quit—6,550 in 2021-22 and 5,270 in 2020-21. That’s about 16 percent of Hong Kong’s 72,374 HK teachers at the time. Prior to those years, the average number of teachers who quit annually was about 3,600. As per figures provided by the Hong Kong Education Bureau to the Legislative Council.
A total of 33,600 students withdrew in 2021-22 and 30,500 in 2020-21. By 2022-23, the huge emigration wave had subsided, with 4,600 withdrawing.
Hong Kong public hospitals lost 254 full-time doctors in 2020-21; 509 in 2021-22, and 484 in 2022-23, for a total of 1,247 full-time doctors lost within three years.
Membership in the Law Society, which solicitors are required to join, grew by only 90 in 2023, down 83 percent from an increase of 532 members in 2020. At least 16 law firms have left or shut down since 2020. There were 1,476 foreign lawyers registered in 2023, down 13 percent from 1,688 in 2019. In 2023-2024, there were about 1,300 applications for the Postgraduate Certificate in Laws, compared to about 1,600 ten years previously.
In early 2023, the civil service numbered just over 170,000, 17,000 short of its full complement, with more than 9,000 vacancies for senior civil servants currently open. More than 10,000 civil servants left between 2021 and 2022. In 2022, 49 Administrative Officers (high-ranking civil servants) resigned, about 6.5 percent of the entire number. In the financial year 2021-2022, 3,734 civil servants quit, the highest number ever since the handover--2.1% of the workforce. "Harmonized" public broadcaster RTHK was among the government departments hardest hit, with 7 percent leaving. Young civil servants aged 20-35 made up 44 percent of resignations.
The number of millionaires in Hong Kong dropped 27 percent from 2012 to 2022 while it grew 40 percent in Singapore, which is often used as a point of comparison to Hong Kong in matters having to do with business and finance. As of 2022, only Russia, China and India had more millionaires leave than Hong Kong.
For the Hong Kong government’s Census and Statistics Department figures on the size of the labor force from 2019 to 2023, see https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/data/stat_report/product/B1130301/att/B11303012019AN19B0100.pdf (3 966 200 in 2019); https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/data/stat_report/product/B1130301/att/B11303012020AN20B0100.pdf (3 888 200 in 2020); https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/data/stat_report/product/B1130301/att/B11303012021AN21B0100.pdf (3 542 800 in 2021); https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/wbr.html?ecode=B11303012022AN22&scode=150#section_2 (3 776 300 in 2022); and https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/wbr.html?ecode=B11303012023AN23 (3,822,300 in 2023).