Migration flows in the region of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

There is a very long history of migration within the region encompassed bymainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In the last half century, migration in the region has been shaped by geopolitics and regional socioeconomic development. The defeat of the Kuomintang in China’s civil war in 1949 triggered millions of people to flee to Hong Kong and Taiwan. In the following decades, there were political campaigns initiated by the government in mainland China. The Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns in 1951 and 1952, the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962, and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 directly affected and sometimes halted the economy and agricultural production, including the Great Famine between 1959 and 1961, led to millions of people to flee to Hong Kong in search of stability (Fong et al., 2018). With the border closing after 1960, there was gradually minimal migration from mainland China to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Migration between these three areas has flourished in recent decades. Since the 1980s, China has pushed for economic reform and opened the market, thereby attracting people from Taiwan in search of opportunities. According to the Chinese census, there were about 170,283 Taiwan residents in mainland China in 2010. The number remained steady ten years later and there were 157,886 Taiwan residents in the mainland in 2020. The same economic opportunity also attracted many people from Hong Kong who relocated or expanded to mainland China in the 1980s and 1990s. The number of Hong Kong residents in mainland China increased by nearly 60 per cent from 234,829 in 2010–371,380 in 2020 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2011, 2021). While people from Hong Kong and Taiwan migrated to mainland China, many from the mainland also moved to Hong Kong and Taiwan. After the return of Hong Kong to mainland China in 1997, more than 760,000 people, mainly females, moved from mainland China to Hong Kong in the next 15 years for family reunification (Pong et al., 2014). The Hong Kong government also launched a series of admission schemes to attract talent worldwide, especially from mainland China. The Admission Scheme for Mainland Talents and Professionals and the Capital Investment Entrant Scheme were introduced in 2003 and the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme was introduced in 2006. More recent schemes include the Immigration Arrangements for Non-local Graduates since 2008 and the Technology Talent Admission Scheme since 2018. By the end of 2019, over 260,000 immigrants had been recruited under these schemes and a considerable proportion of them came from mainland China (Hong Kong Government, 2020).