Hong Kong returnee
Open-knowledge reference entry
A Hong Kong returnee is a resident of Hong Kong who emigrated to another country, lived for an extended period of time in their adopted home, and then subsequently moved back to Hong Kong.
Population
According to the Hong Kong Transition Project of Hong Kong Baptist University, in 2002, Hong Kong returnees constituted 3% of the Hong Kong population. This number was arrived at by survey and a participant was categorised as a "returnee" by self-identification. As such, it excluded those Hong Kongers surveyed who had foreign citizenship, but did not self-identify as "returnees".
Emigration
Most returnees left Hong Kong during the 1980s and the 1990s leading up to the handover of Hong Kong back to China. According to Matthew Cheung, Secretary for Labour and Welfare, approximately 600,000 people emigrated before and around 1997. The destination of choice was usually a Western country, the most popular being Canada, Australia, and the United States.
There are typically two types of emigrants, those who planned on returning to Hong Kong after they obtained foreign citizenship and those who planned on staying in their adopted homes permanently and fully adapting to life there. The former are sometimes better described as sojourners rather than emigrants. However, often these two types of Hong Kong emigrants act against what they had planned, where some of those who had planned on permanent stays actually returned to Hong Kong, some planning on temporary stays actually made the decision to stay permanently in their adopted homelands.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hong Kong returnee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.