The city once lauded for its embrace of diversity and cosmopolitanism, even branded by its first Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa as “Asia’s World City”, has been slowly but palpably easing out non-Chinese professionals from the NGO sector.
This Sinicization process among nonprofits began after the end of the 2019 Occupy protests, when the government declared that one of the main reasons behind the social upheaval was economic marginalization. especially among young workers. Pretty soon, government funding for subvented (publicly supported) NGOs became more frequent and substantial, mainly through the Hong Kong Council of Social Service (HKCSS), an association of vetted nonprofits overseen by the Chief Executive’s office.
Another manifestation is requiring new hires to be fluent in Cantonese or at least Mandarin (Putonghua), with some advertised roles requiring the ability to write in Chinese script. This is logical for nonprofits serving locals, but even those serving non-locals such as migrant domestic workers, resident ethnic minorities and asylum-seekers/refugees began inserting this criterion into their job ads. The reasoning is that this enhances opportunities for partnerships, fundraising and marketing among local organizations in the city, as well as communication with fellow staff who are locals.
In a city that lags behind Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines for proficiency in spoken English in Asia, requiring foreign professionals to be fluent in Chinese may seem like the easier solution compared to having locals improve their spoken English. The latter approach would necessitate an overhaul of Hong Kong’s educational system, which puts emphasis on reading and writing rather than speaking English. However, this “easier” option is actually much more difficult than it looks.
Learning conversational Cantonese or Mandarin requires that a non-Chinese take language lessons over several months, while upgrading to a business-level version, much less learning to write it, would take much longer. In Hong Kong’s fast-paced work environment where 10-12 hours per day of intensive grind is considered normal, a foreign expat would have a hard time to put in the required number of hours for Chinese lessons. During my 13 years of nonprofit work in the city, I’ve never met an expat who communicates with locals in Mandarin, much less in Cantonese. It’s always in English, and no one raised any issue about it.
While passed off as a necessity by NGO employers as a way of connecting better with the local community, this creeping Sinicization of Hong Kong’s nonprofit sector is essentially political in nature. Considered a chink in the armor of “National Security” due to perceived role of NGOs in fomenting anti-Beijing unrest, the mainland government has been quietly plugging a hole whereby Western-oriented, social justice advocates can sneak in and help revive a dormant protest movement.
It remains to be seen whether this silent weeding out process will work as intended, given that Chinese speakers who are sympathetic to Occupy ideals would be more effective at stirring up resistance among locals, given the lack of a language barrier. But even without politics, the acquiescence of many NGO leaders to this Sinicization trend is already contributing to the erosion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion that used to be the hallmark of Hong Kong’s hiring ethos.