Foreign talent needed to maintain the city’s international status, say business chambers, expertsSome returning expats notice more Mandarin being spoken, reflecting large number of mainland migrants
First Hong Kong-made satellite set to be launched in late November from Guangdong province, company reveals
Voke, her husband and infant son were among those who left in February last year. There had been a wave of expatriate departures that month, triggered by news of a British mother separated from her baby at a Hong Kong hospital after the 11-month-old tested positive for Covid-19.Voke, director of teacher training at the English For Asia language centre, said she and her husband had seriously considered leaving for good, even after returning to Hong Kong at the end of May last year.
“The teacher training courses we run used to be 50 per cent local Hongkongers and 50 per cent people from the UK, India and the US too. Now, we might get one person from the UK per course with more trainees from other countries in Asia,” she said. A spokesman said the city’s pandemic restrictions, concerns over the national security law, the slow economic recovery and geopolitical tensions had all affected Hong Kong’s attractiveness to foreigners.
Briton Fiona Campbell, 42, came back to the city last month with her husband and three young children. Her husband’s teaching job took them first to Malaysia in 2020 and then Dubai, before they eventually returned. McComb said top financial centres such as London, New York and Singapore had one thing in common – a diverse make-up of nationalities, backgrounds and beliefs which created a sense of vibrancy.
She lived in the city from 2010 to 2012, returned home and then came back last October with her husband, a venture capitalist, and two children. She said Hong Kong’s attraction was its easy access to South Korea, the financial sector and low tax rate. For Hong Kong to retain its appeal to expatriates from across the globe, she felt, multinational businesses should not stop using English.Sid Sibal, search firm Hudson’s vice-president of Greater China and head of Hong Kong, said that over the past five years, more employers in the city were looking for people who could speak Mandarin and that had reduced the job prospects for expatriates from Western countries.
To attract expatriates to return, he said, it would help if the Hong Kong government convinced companies to set up their regional headquarters in the city again and have more roles for English speakers. But, recalling how one job candidate in London asked if Hong Kong was still the way it used to be, he said: “There’s that fear factor or uncertainty about whether Hong Kong is the Hong Kong they have from their memory.”
However, Alicia Garcia Herrero, an adjunct professor of economics at the University of Science and Technology, said if Hong Kong was to be the offshore financial centre of China, hiring mainland talent would serve the city’s purpose. Amate, who is Spanish, said the current number of expatriates was well below what chamber members preferred it to be, while the wave of migrants from the mainland was steering Hong Kong towards focusing more on that market.
She said Hong Kong had to stay international or it risked becoming “just another Chinese city” or even inferior to the mainland’s top-tier cities. A spokesman for the Labour and Welfare Bureau said the government would set up a physical office for its “Hong Kong Talent Engage” online platform, “to step up efforts on talent engagement, promotion and networking around the world and enhance support for incoming talents”.
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