Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. Composed of peninsular territories and islands on the South China Sea coast of China, Hong Kong is a vibrant metropolis in its own right. Though relatively small in size, Hong Kong is one of the world’s most important business centers and plays a pivotal role in economic relations between Asia and the West.

After the First Opium War (1839–42), Hong Kong became a part of the British Empire and remained under British control through World War II. An agreement was signed in 1984 by the Chinese and British governments that arranged for Britain to return control of Hong Kong to China in July 1997. On July 1, 1997, an elaborate state ceremony took place in which Great Britain handed sovereignty of Hong Kong back to the Chinese government. After regaining Hong Kong, the Chinese implemented a “one country, two systems” policy, which permitted Hong Kong to maintain its capitalist economic system and local autonomy. However, China oversees its international affairs and national defense.

General Information

• Full name of country: Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
• Region: East & Southeast Asia
• Nationality: Chinese/Hong Konger (noun), Chinese/Hong Kong (adjective)
• Official language: Cantonese, English
• Population: 7,288,167 (2023 est.)
• Population growth: 0.15% (2023 est.)
• Currency (money): Hong Kong dollar
• Land area: 1,054 sq km (407 sq miles)
• Water area: 50 sq km (19 sq miles)
• Time zone: UTC +8
• Flag: The flag of Hong Kong features a field of red with a five-petal, white Bauhinia flower placed at the center. There is a red star at the center of each petal, which recall the stars featured on the Chinese flag. The Bauhinia flower is representative of the Hong Kong region.
• Independence: Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China. Pursuant to an agreement signed by China and the UK on 19 December 1984, Hong Kong became the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China on 1 July 1997. In t
• Government type: limited democracy
• Suffrage: 18 years of age in direct elections for half the legislature and a majority of seats in 18 district councils; universal for permanent residents living in the territory of Hong Kong for the past seven years; note – in indirect elections, suffrage is limited to about 220,000 members of functional constituencies for the other half of the legislature and a 1,200-member election committee for the chief executive drawn from broad sectoral groupings, central government bodies, municipal organizations, and elected Hong Kong officials
• Legal system: mixed legal system of common law based on the English model and Chinese customary law (in matters of family and land tenure)
• National anthem: “Yiyongjun Jinxingqu” (The March of the Volunteers), by Tian Han/Nie Er
• National holiday: National Day (Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China), October 1 (1949); note – July 1, 1997 is celebrated as Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day

Note: unless otherwise indicated, statistical data in this article is sourced from the CIA World Factbook, as cited in the bibliography.

People and Culture

Population: Hong Kong’s population is overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese (91.6 percent), with most Hong Kongers descended from immigrants from Guangdong (Canton) province to the region (2016 estimate). Hong Kongers of Filipino descent make up 2.7 percent of Hong Kong’s population, while those of Indonesian descent make up 1.9 percent (2021 estimate).

About one million Hong Kongers practice Buddhism, while another million adhere to Daoism. Nearly 900,000 practice Christianity, roughly one-third Catholic and two-thirds Protestant; around 300,000 are Muslim. Smaller numbers of Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Mormons, Bahai's, and Zoroastrians also live in Hong Kong. Confucianism is common and often practiced along with another faith (2016 estimates).

According to the World Bank, the region’s population density was about 7,060 persons per square kilometer in 2021 and is among the highest in the world.

Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 83.8 years (2023 estimate). The infant mortality rate is 2.5 deaths per 1,000 live births (2024 estimate).

Indigenous People: Hong Kong’s earliest residents were Stone Age people whose descendants became ethnic Cantonese. During the Qing dynasty in China, from the seventeenth century through 1911, Hong Kong was a peripheral part of the empire, home to fishermen and the occasional pirate. These early residents were culturally similar, if not identical, to their counterparts on the mainland.

Education: Hong Kong’s educational system is loosely based on the English model inherited from nineteenth-century colonizers. Children attend kindergarten for up to three years. After reaching the age of six, all children must attend at least six years of primary level education. Most primary schools teach in Chinese, and teach English as a second language. The many international schools in Hong Kong teach in other languages with different curricula. Primary and secondary education in the public schools is free.

Students must attend three years of secondary school but can take up to six years. Secondary school grade levels are called “forms.” Starting in 2009 several educational reforms took effect in the region, including a switch to six years of secondary education from seven years. A new Hong Kong secondary school curriculum was introduced at the secondary four level that year. The 2009 curriculum has four core subjects: Chinese language, English, mathematics, and liberal studies. Students must choose up to four elective courses to take out of twenty subjects. A new graduating exam, the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE), was introduced in the summer of 2012, to a double cohort of secondary six students. The HKDSE replaced the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE), given after secondary five, and the A-Levels, given to about a third of HKCEE test-takers. The new exams increased the number of students able to complete six years of secondary education as well as the number of students taking the graduating exam.

Those students who have completed the HKDSE are rated by examination performances and other factors for admission to one of Hong Kong’s numerous colleges and universities. The most prominent of these are the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Health Care: Hong Kong’s health care system is a work in progress. During the early British colonial administration, health care was provided by private physicians and hospitals and paid for by patients. During the first half of the twentieth century, Hong Kong’s government began subsidizing health care, resulting in the current system.

Under current government policy, hospitals are the focal point for patient care and are heavily subsidized by the government. Patients go to centrally located hospital facilities for inpatient care, emergencies, and general care. Hospitals charge a minimal flat fee for all services, but no patient is denied care for financial reasons. The government encourages residents to obtain private health insurance coverage to help relieve strain on the public health system. Patients with private health insurance can use private hospitals, choose their doctors, and avoid long wait times common at public hospitals and clinics.

According to Hong Kong’s Department of Health, the majority of hospitals in Hong Kong are public hospitals. In 2021, there were forty-three public hospitals, twelve private hospitals, and sixty-nine nursing homes in Hong Kong, with over 15,000 doctors and over 61,000 registered nurses caring for patients (or, one doctor per 489 people and one nurse per 122 people).

Food: Hong Kong bills itself as the “culinary capital of Asia,” a title that refers to the incredible amount and variety of food available in the region. According to Hong Kong’s Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, the territory boasts more than sixteen thousand licensed restaurants, including general, light-refreshment, and marine restaurants. Most, though not all, of the territory’s residents enjoy a Cantonese-style diet of rice, meat, fish, and vegetables that are usually stir fried in oil or water and served in soy or ginger-based sauces.

For purposes of tourism, the territory is broken up into food “districts,” including Causeway Bay, Kowloon City, Lan Kwai Fong and Soho, Sai Kung, Lamma Island, and Lei Yue Mun, Stanley, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Hung Hom. Each district has a mixture of culinary styles, but tends toward a particular regional cuisine. Aberdeen Harbor is famous for its floating restaurants.

Hong Kong is also famous for its dim sum, snacks served for breakfast or lunch and made of a wide variety of bite-sized finger foods. Meat or seafood-filled dumplings, buns, and seafood balls all appear on the dim sum trolleys from which diners choose their selections.

Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan style also includes foods from other parts of Asia and China, and from Europe, South America, and North America.

Arts & Entertainment: Hong Kong is a capitalist center for people throughout the world, and shopping has become a standard form of entertainment that builds up to a summer-long shopping festival hosted by the Board of Tourism.

Hong Kong’s subtropical climate makes for popular beaches. Repulse Bay Beach on the southern side of Hong Kong Island is crowded during daylight hours year-round, but many residents escape to the slightly less crowded sands in Stanley.

Movie theaters, golf courses, nightclubs, bowling alleys, and even a few hiking trails and gardens serve Hong Kongers during their leisure time. Traditional Asian silk, woodcarving, and ceramic arts abound in Hong Kong’s marketplaces. These traditional crafts, along with music, dance, and modern art, are highlighted each year during the international Festival of Asian Arts, held during the autumn months.

Holidays: Hong Kong’s public holidays reflect a combination of British Christian influence and Asian heritage. The territory recognizes New Year’s Day on January 1, but also Chinese New Year (celebrated according to a lunar calendar in January or February), when fireworks displays explode over Hong Kong Harbor. British-based holidays include Easter, Christmas, Labour Day, and Boxing Day. Hong Kong also celebrates Ching Ming in early April, Buddha’s birthday in April or May, Hong Kong SAR Establishment Day on July 1, National Day on October 1, and Chung Yeung Festival of Ancestors in mid to late October.

Festivals are common too. The Lantern Festival occurs around February. Every May or June, Hong Kong slows down for the Dragon Boat Festival, when dragon boat races take place in Hong Kong and the outlying islands. In September and October, Hong Kongers hang decorative lanterns from homes, boats, temples, and businesses for the Mid-Autumn Festival. In April or May, Hong Kong’s Daoists celebrate the Tin Hau Festival, dedicated to the goddess Tin Hau, by decorating Chinese junks in the harbor and parading them to Tin Hau temples for prayer and thanksgiving.

Environment and Geography

Topography: The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region consists of four primary areas: Hong Kong Island (the region’s urban center), Kowloon Peninsula adjacent to the island, the New Territories that create a buffer between Kowloon and the Chinese mainland, and the 234 Outlying Islands.

Though the seabed around Hong Kong’s territory is relatively flat, the islands and territorial mainland consist of steep hills made of volcanic rock and granite. The terrain is particularly steep in the southern islands, and somewhat flatter toward the north.

Along Hong Kong Island’s famous Victoria Harbour, steep cliffs fall into the water below, making the city’s 800-meter (2,625 feet) outdoor escalator a local necessity. Hong Kong’s highest elevation is found at Tai Mo Shan in the New Territories, which rises to 958 meters (3,143 feet).

Natural Resources: Hong Kong’s most important natural resource is its deepwater harbor, serving as a world-class port for international shipping. Hong Kong also has reserves of feldspar, a family of silicate minerals.

Plants & Animals: The full-blown urbanization of Hong Kong has left little more than seabirds, insects, lizards, and brush in the way of indigenous plants and animals. About 400 square kilometers (250 square miles) of parkland and conservation land have been spared Hong Kong’s booming urban development, however. The Sai Kung Peninsula, Mai Po Marsh, the MacLehose Trail, and other undeveloped land in the New Territories preserve native bird species like herons, egrets, cormorants, and curlew, as well as bauhinia and incense trees.

Climate: Hong Kong has a subtropical climate that varies only slightly during the year. January and February are the coolest, cloudiest months of the year, with lows around 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). During the summer months from May to August, temperatures reach highs of about 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day, and lows around 26 degrees Celsius (79 degrees Fahrenheit) at night. The air is humid throughout the year, but particularly in the summer, when Hong Kong is prone to thunderstorms and heavy rainfall.

May to November is cyclone season in Hong Kong, with typhoons most likely in November. Annual rainfall averages about 220 centimeters (87 inches).

Economy

Hong Kong’s economy depends on international trade. Hong Kong has integrated its economy more fully with China’s since becoming a Chinese special administrative region.

In 2023, Hong Kong’s gross domestic product (GDP, purchasing power parity) was estimated at US$485.559 billion. The estimated per capita GDP for the same period was US$64,400.

Industry: Hong Kong began as a trading port, but became an industrial capital after the United States imposed a trade embargo on Chinese goods during the Korean War. Shipping remains an important industry.

Hong Kong’s manufacturing base is primarily in textiles and clothing, electronics, toys, and watches and clocks. However, services, including banking and finance, now dominate the territory’s economy, both in terms of GDP and employment.

Agriculture: Agriculture is a negligible portion of Hong Kong’s economy. Hong Kongers are likely to grow fresh vegetables and keep chickens and pigs. Fishing remains a more substantial part of life in Hong Kong.

Tourism:Tourism remains essential to Hong Kong’s economic structure, and has grown substantially since the territory returned to Chinese sovereignty, prompting the Chinese government to loosen travel restrictions between Hong Kong and the mainland. However, the tourism industry in Hong Kong was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused significant travel restrictions around the world. Hong Kong enacted some of the strictest travel policies in the world in response to the pandemic, due to its "zero-COVID" policy, and its borders were essentially closed to international visitors from early 2020 until mid-2022.

During non-pandemic years, Hong Kong’s tourist industry is large and sophisticated. Tourism is geared mainly toward the cosmopolitan city of Hong Kong which offers hundreds of clubs and restaurants and world-renowned shopping.

Most visitors to Hong Kong come from mainland China. In 2020, 61 percent of Hong Kong’s visitors were from the mainland.

Government

Hong Kong’s modern political history began with the sale of illegal drugs and the subsequent Opium Wars. British traders first brought opium from Bengal to the Guangzhou (Canton) coast in 1773, when they landed with 70,000 kilograms of the addictive drug. During the nineteenth century, traders from Europe and the United States paid for their Chinese imported goods by illegally selling opium on the Chinese mainland. The Chinese government’s efforts to put an end to the opium trade brought on a British blockade along the Guangzhou coast. The eventual British invasion of Hong Kong was partially financed by French, Russians, and Americans hoping to protect their own trading interests. The blockade ended with China’s assent to British sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1860. The British added the New Territories in 1898 under a ninety-nine-year lease.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Hong Kong had become a major industrial base in addition to its continued importance in international trade. However, in 1984, with the lease set to run out in 1997, the British and Chinese governments agreed that both the New Territories and the original peninsula and islands would be ceded back to China. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong became a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. China’s “one country, two systems” policy permits Hong Kong to retain much of its local decision-making authority, while withholding international and defense issues for Chinese central authority until 2047.

Hong Kong operates under a limited constitution called the Basic Law, which has been approved by the Chinese government. According to political experts, the Basic Law wording is not clear about the structure of elections in the region. The law specifies that in a direct election, all permanent residents who have resided in Hong Kong for at least seven years and who are of at least eighteen years of age may vote.

Under current government structures, however, only half of the seventy-member Legislative Council (LegCo) is elected by popular vote. Another thirty seats are indirectly elected by about 220,000 members of “functional constituencies” (professional or special interest groups), and five at-large seats are elected by all voters not in a functional constituency. Moreover, there is no popular election for the executive branch of government, which consists of a president, chief executive, and executive council. The president is selected by China’s National People’s Congress, and a 1,200-member Election Committee chooses the chief executive. Pro-democracy advocates within Hong Kong regularly protest the Chinese government’s control of executive elections and affairs.

Between September and December 2014, students and other protesters demonstrated against China’s decisions regarding electoral reforms in Hong Kong. The 2014 demonstrations became known as the Umbrella Revolution or Umbrella Movement.

In October 2016, a dozen pro-democracy and localist LegCo members-elect used their oath-taking ceremonies to protest in favor of Hong Kong’s independence from China. As a result, six of the twelve members-elect were disqualified from taking office, prompting a by-election in 2018 to fill five of the six vacant LegCo seats. Two of the seats were retained by pro-democracy candidates, while another three seats were won by pro-Beijing candidates. Large-scale protests erupted again in 2019 in opposition to a proposed bill allowing extradition to mainland China, which protesters feared would undermine the "one country, two systems" policy.

In response to the 2019 protests, the Chinese government placed new restrictions on Hong Kong residents, including enacting a new national security law that allowed officials to arrest pro-democracy activists and media organizations. Additionally, China restructured the LegCo in March 2021 to allow only government-approved candidates to run for office, which resulted in nearly all LegCo seats being occupied by pro-establishment candidates following the December 2021 election.

As the sole candidate approved by China in the 2022 Hong Kong Chief Executive election, John Lee took office in July 2022.

Interesting Facts

• The name “Hong Kong” is thought to be derived from the Cantonese term for “Fragrant Harbor.”
• Hong Kong’s Central-Mid-Levels Escalator and Walkway System is the world’s longest covered escalator system, with three moving walkways and twenty elevated walkways that stretch 800 meters (2,625 feet) long.
• A large bronze statue of Buddha, called Big Buddha, is one of Hong Kong's most famous landmarks. Located on Lantau Island, it is 34 meters (112 feet) high.

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