“My boss is from Beijing and cannot speak English or Cantonese, so all my colleagues, the Hongkongers included, use Mandarin,” she said.

“I try to speak Cantonese when I am out and about, but even the aunties at the market speak Mandarin to me.”

She is among tens of thousands of mainland Chinese who have flooded into Hong Kong on various work visas and talent schemes since the city reopened fully in February.

Western expatriates, including those from Britain, the United States and Australia, have been slower to return, sparking concern among some experts about the effect on the city’s diversity, creativity and international financial hub status.

The city saw a wave of emigration and an exodus of expatriates after Beijing imposed the national security law in 2020 and authorities persisted with some of the world’s harshest Covid-19 curbs.

Steering the city towards recovery, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu has moved to woo talent by easing visa requirements and introducing a new recruitment scheme.

Across all schemes, mainland Chinese have made up the overwhelming majority of applicants and accounted for more than nine in 10 of all those approved to move to Hong Kong this year, according to official data.

About 47,000 mainland professionals have received work visas across five schemes from January to July, surpassing the 23,000 for the whole of 2018.

The 10,167 approvals for the Admission Scheme for Mainland Talents and Professionals in the first seven months of the year were on track to surpass the 13,768 in 2018.

The Top Talent Pass Scheme, introduced last December for those who earned no less than HK$2.5 million per year or were graduates of one of the world’s top 100 universities, had 25,961 successful main applicants as at the end of June, 95 per cent of whom were from the mainland.

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Under the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme for both overseas and mainland talent, there were 9,522 approvals from January to July, almost all of them mainland Chinese.

The Technology Talent Admission Scheme for non-local tech talent attracted only 78 people, but here too, mainlanders made up more than four-fifths.

Visas were also granted to 10,681 mainlanders who applied under the Immigration Arrangements for Non-local Graduates, a scheme for attendees of Hong Kong universities who remain in the city to work. More than nine out of 10 applicants were successful.

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Many of those who moved to Hong Kong to work brought their families too, according to Immigration Department data.

In the first half of this year, 48,691 dependent visas were issued, including 22,751 for family members of those who came under the Top Talent Pass Scheme.

In contrast, expatriate arrivals were sluggish and mostly nowhere near the levels in 2018, the year before Hong Kong experienced several months of social unrest.

From January to July this year, the number from the UK, US and Australia approved under the General Employment Policy for non-mainland talent hovered at around only a fifth of the 2018 figure.

Canadian, French, Indian and Japanese arrivals were approaching a third of their 2018 total. South Koreans returned at a faster pace, exceeding two-fifths of the 2018 level, while Filipinos were on track to surpass their previous number by the end of this year.

A change in how mainlanders integrate

Professor Eric Fong Wai-ching, an expert in migration and urban sociology at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), noted that many of the new mainland arrivals were highly educated, including some who studied overseas.

While previous waves of mainland talent arrived mostly from nearby provinces such as Guangdong and had ties to the city, many of the newcomers were from elsewhere on the mainland and did not necessarily have local connections.

This meant that the way the mainlanders integrated into Hong Kong had changed.

The earlier arrivals had friends and relatives who introduced them to other locals in the city.

The mainlanders who arrived more recently, over the past decade or so, came in large enough numbers to form their own community easily, and would have to make an effort to get to know locals.

“So I would say the integration dynamic is very different compared with the earlier generation,” Fong said.

He added that it was important for the government to allocate resources and have programmes to help new migrants integrate into Hong Kong society, and it also had to ease fears among locals over perceived competition for jobs.

Sid Sibal, search firm Hudson’s vice-president of Greater China and head of Hong Kong, said he expected no slowdown in mainland arrivals.

He said employers in Hong Kong had a “very big” appetite for mainland professionals, and the Top Talent Pass Scheme, for those who had not yet secured a job offer, had proven a game changer.

“Almost every week now, candidates sitting in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen are sending us their resume,” he said.

They were zooming in on jobs in Chinese-owned firms and some Hong Kong-owned firms, he said, whereas Western expatriates were drawn mainly to executive-level, legal and tech jobs where Mandarin proficiency was not a major requirement.

Alexa Chow Yee-ping, managing director of executive search agency ACTS Consulting, said many mainland Chinese worked in finance as fund managers and investment and market analysts as well as in IT, engineering and education.

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‘Top talent visa made all the difference’

At a small coffee shop in Admiralty, Huang Yuxin, 28, was scrolling through Xiaohongshu, the mainland’s Instagram-like social media platform.

“I use Xiaohongshu to find places for shopping, cafes and restaurants. It is good because I can get away from typical tourist areas and get to know Hong Kong,” she said.

A user experience designer from Zunyi, in Guizhou province, she arrived in Hong Kong in August under the top talent scheme.

She declined to reveal her pay, but said she was earning 60 per cent more in Hong Kong than at her previous job in the technology hub of Shenzhen.

“Hong Kong offers me the freedom to live in an international city while being close to home,” she said.

She said she expected to stay about three to five years, and hoped her experience in a large company in the city would be a stepping stone to a job abroad.

Huang qualified under the top talent scheme because she graduated with a degree in engineering from Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of the top 100 universities in the world. She went on to do a master’s degree in interaction design at the University of Sydney.

“At first, when I was applying for jobs from Shenzhen, I had to tell recruiters that I did not have a visa and I could not speak Cantonese,” she said.

Then she applied for the top talent visa and it made all the difference in her move to Hong Kong.

“Once I was approved and put it on my CV, interviews and offers from international companies started coming in thick and fast,” she said.

Still, she admitted feeling apprehensive about moving to the city and being unable to speak Cantonese.

“I saw a lot of negative stuff about mainlanders being discriminated against in Hong Kong, especially since the 2019 riots,” she said.

“But I have met a lot of people who do not care [that I’m a mainlander] and even speak to me in Mandarin.”

However, Huang said she was trying to fit in, and had started learning Cantonese, heading to local eateries and making Hongkonger friends.

As for where she might move to next, she said Australia was a possibility as she loved its beaches and slower pace of life, but she did not rule out returning to the mainland where the cost of living and property were much lower than in Hong Kong.

Cecilia Wang Wenxi and Ray Jiang Lei, both 35 and graduates of Chinese University, said they were planning to put down roots in Hong Kong with their two sons.

Jiang, a stock investor, was accepted under the top talent scheme in March. Wang commutes from their home in Kowloon Tong to her job at a local council in Shenzhen.

She said: “We have reunited with our old classmates since we returned, our friends are a mix of locals and mainlanders.

They said they liked the lifestyle in Hong Kong and the ease of returning to the mainland, where they had family and could spend less on eating out and leisure activities.

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Their sons were happy at their Hong Kong school, which had a mix of mainland and local students.

“They were very warmly welcomed,” Wang said. “At first, the other students would speak to them in Mandarin, but they were able to pick up Cantonese very fast.”

The couple have been taking Cantonese lessons and make the effort to attend local sports clubs and events.

Wang is also the administrator of a WeChat group of about 300 mainlanders in Hong Kong, most of whom live in the New Territories.

“They live in Tai Wai, Fo Tan and Sha Tin because it is convenient for travelling back to the mainland, yet not too far from the city,” she said.

According to members of another WeChat group for mainland Chinese working in the city, Hong Kong’s beaches, watersports, nature trails and outdoor activities were all major attractions, making the New Territories a popular choice for them to live.

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Patrick Yeung Wai-tim, CEO of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, said many mainland professionals working in Hong Kong were eager to develop an international career, and the city could capitalise on their language ability and cultural understanding to help the flow of investment into and out of mainland China.

But he said other talent from overseas was needed for Hong Kong to maintain its status as a global business and financial hub and drive future growth.

The chamber counts leading companies such as Swire, Jardines and HSBC among about 4,000 members.

HKU’s Fong said it remained to be seen if the newly arrived mainlanders would remain for the long term, but they were undoubtedly changing the city’s demographic composition.

He said there would be “a strong impact” if the levels of Western expatriates did not return to what they were before the pandemic, because diversity was a hallmark of Hong Kong society.

“Hong Kong has been an international city and having people from different places is what made the city very vibrant, the workplace diverse … and because of that it makes the city very attractive to live in,” he said.