Postcolonial border crossing

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Postcolonial border crossingCangbai Wang, Siu-lun Wong & Victor ZhengPublished online: 23 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Cangbai Wang, Siu-lun Wong & Victor Zheng , Asian Population Studies (2013):Postcolonial border crossing, Asian Population Studies, DOI: 10.1080/17441730.2013.870826

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POSTCOLONIAL BORDER CROSSINGBritish skilled expatriates in post-1997 HongKong

Cangbai Wang, Siu-lun Wong and Victor Zheng

Through a postcolonial lens and based on in-depth interviews with British expatriates who moved

to Hong Kong in the first decade after its handover, this paper highlights the contested role of

borders in the everyday making and remaking of skilled migration. It draws on Paasi’s (2003)

definition of boundaries to denote that borders are not merely geographical lines but zones of

mixing, blending and reconfiguring historically formed material connections, identities and power

relations through which contemporary skilled mobility is constituted. The border crossing of skills

in Hong Kong and elsewhere is a historically contingent phenomenon whose meaning derives not

only from economic forces and social networking but also the accumulated history of the borders

they cross. The notion of ‘postcolonial border crossing’ highlights the dis/continuity in skilled

migration and integrates social, cultural and economic spheres into the same framework in

interpreting skilled mobility.

KEYWORDS: British expatriates; border; Hong Kong; mainland China; Postcolonial

Introduction

Skilled migration is one of the main drivers and manifestations of globalisation andhas attracted increasing scholarly attention in the past two decades. Earlier sociologicalstudies of skilled migrants are largely dominated by functionalist and structuralistapproaches. Research guided by the functionalist approach tends to explain the globalflow of skills in terms of ‘rational choices’ of individuals in response to market conditionsand career opportunities at the micro level (Beaverstock, 1994; Findlay, 1990, 1995; Kim,1996; Salt & Findlay, 1989). Scholars informed by the structuralist view, however, stress theglobal shifts of investment and sites of production at the macro level as the driving forcebehind skilled migration in which global cities play a pivotal role in the attraction andaggregation of highly skilled migrants (Ewers, 2007; Lipietz, 1993; Price & Benton-Short,2007; Sassen, 1991; Taylor, 2004). Despite the dissimilar focus of investigation, they share aneo-classical-oriented worldview that overwhelmingly describes skilled migration as aneconomically driven phenomenon with a distinctively contemporary and transient nature.Managerial and professional migrants are more often than not depicted as ‘skilledtransients’ (Findlay, 1995, p. 515) or ‘nomadic workers’ (Beaverstock, 2005, p. 246)moving effortlessly in the frictionless ‘space of flows’ of global capital (Castells, 1996)

Asian Population Studies, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17441730.2013.870826

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via inter-and-intra company transfers (Beaverstock & Boardwell, 2000; Beaverstock &Smith,1996; Findlay & Li, 1998; Findlay, Li, Jowett, & Skeldon, 1996; Peixoto, 2001).

The recent development of academic literature on skilled migration witnesses anemerging paradigm that shifts away from a narrow focus on the economic rationalitiesand corporate logics to merge economic and social/cultural spheres of skilled migrationwithin the same framework in order to understand skilled mobility. On the one hand, thenew scholarship on skilled migration has attempted to go beyond a highly abstracted andgeneralised ideal of transnational careerists to portray them as ‘embodied bearers ofculture, ethnicity, class and gender’ (Yeoh & Huang, 2011, p. 682) by paying attention togender-differentiated and ethnicity-differentiated power geometries operative acrossdomestic and working spaces, in both home and host societies, and at both local andnational levels (Kofman, 2000; Kofman & Raghuram, 2004, 2006; Raghuram, 2000; Yeoh &Willis, 1999, 2005a, 2005b). On the other hand, it has made efforts to transcend earlierassumptions of skilled migrants as footloose cosmopolitan flyers to examine ‘embedded-ness in localities’ of skilled migrants with a focus on ‘the diversity of opportunities,constraints, and experiences within the category of skilled migrants’ (Nagel, 2005, p. 208)in the ‘countless negotiation of sameness and difference in their everyday encounteringlocalities and making place’ (Wang, 2012, p. 565). As Yeoh and Willis argued,

transnational elites belong as much to the ‘space of place’ as to the ‘space of flows’ …Despite their fluidity and transience, the presence of cosmopolitan elites does generate amultiplicity of contact zones within the globalising city … the embodied presence ofcosmopolitan elites is both catalyst and medium of cultural politics of the everyday sort.(2005a, pp. 270–271)

The ‘contact zone’ notion coined by Pratt (1992) in her study of colonial encountersand applied by Yeoh and Willis (2005a) to the study of transnational skilled migrants is agood explanation of how migrant groups with different nationalities and culturalbackgrounds engage with local populations and negotiate the frontiers of difference indiverse ways. However, what remains under-studied is the ‘significance of the past inshaping contemporary expatriate mobility (as well as) postcolonial continuity in relation topeople, practices and imaginations’ (Fechter & Walsh, 2010, p. 1197). To extend the currentdiscussion on contact zones, we seek to bring more attention to the changing andcontested role of borders in the everyday making and remaking of skilled mobility. Wedraw on Paasi’s definition of boundaries as ‘dense and multiple layered processes …

[having] crucial links with identity, action, mobility and power that we need to grasp if weare to understand the changing spatialities of our globalizing world’ (2003, pp. 463–464).This socio-cultural re-definition of boundaries denotes the rich and transformative natureof borders as a set of spatialised relationships, experiences, and understandings that arestructurally layered, temporally transforming and embedded in, as well as constructive of,broader geo-political and geo-economic relations. As such, borders are not merely politicaland geographical lines on a map to separate political and territorial units but zones ofmixing, blending, and reconfiguring historically formed material connections, identitiesand power relations through which contemporary skilled mobility is constituted. Apostcolonial perspective helps us to understand how the border crossing of skilledmigrants has become a historically contingent phenomenon whose meaning derives notmerely from economic forces and social networking but also the accumulated history of

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the borders they cross. The ‘post’ in postcolonialism, as emphasised by scholars ofpostcolonial theory, refers not only to a temporal period or stage following formal deco-lonisation, but more importantly a set of critical approaches to identify continuities withthe colonial through reconfigured colonial relations in the movement of ‘deconstruction-reconstruction’ of power relations (Hall, 1996). Alongside this historicity is an emphasis onthe multiplicity of postcolonial experiences because ‘neither colonial, nor postcolonial,experiences and histories can be understood in homogenised or essentialised terms. Theabstract needs to be made particular through attention to the specific and the local’(Leonard, 2010, p. 1249).

By formulating the notion of ‘postcolonial border crossing’ and using Hong Kong asa case study, this paper looks at the nuanced ways in which the linkages, experiences, andunderstandings inherited from the colonial past are revoked, re-configured, and re-imagined by British expatriates to redefine the meanings of borders in the postcolonialpresent, to sustain and transform the border crossing of skills today and inform its futuredevelopment. It also unveils heterogeneous understandings and practices of individualBritish expatriates and the fragmentation of their identities as postcolonial subjects. Skilledmigrants in postcolonial Hong Kong constantly mediate the temporal relationshipbetween the past, the present and the future, a process that involves adaptation,supervision and invention, opening up spaces for re-imagination and innovation to carveout a new space in global cities. Formulated as such, the notion of ‘postcolonial bordercrossing’ highlights the dis/continuity in skilled migration and serves as an analytical toolthat integrates social, cultural and economic spheres and bridges the past and the presentwithin the same framework in interpreting skilled mobility.

The next section introduces the data on which this paper is based and the methodsused to collect them. The main part of the paper is devoted to the narratives of four Britishexpatriates of different ages, types of engagement, and lengths of residence in HongKong. This is followed by a discussion that compares and analyses different types ofpostcolonial encounters of expatriates in relation to the question of postcolonial bordercrossing. It concludes with arguments about the major findings and broader implicationsof this Hong Kong-based research.

Skilled Expatriates in Postcolonial Hong Kong

Colonial Hong Kong was one of the most popular destinations for skilledexpatriates,1 mostly from the UK and other Western countries (Findlay & Li, 1998; Findlayet al., 1996; Li, Findlay, & Jones, 1998). The influx of skilled expatriates continued until the1997 handover (Chan & Lin, 2008). However, from 1996 onwards, the numbers of Westernexpatriates, especially the British, dropped sharply. In contrast, skilled migrants from thePRC have increased steadily in the same period, supplemented by talents from some Asiancountries (Wang, 2006, pp. 331–332). The city of Hong Kong provides precious empiricalmaterial for exploring how transnational skilled migrants are shaped by and respond toborder transformation as an integral part of the simultaneous process of decolonisation(from the British ex-coloniser) and re-colonisation (or the ‘motherland colonization’ ascalled by Chow [1992]). Although Hong Kong’s history makes it a unique case, it representsimportant general aspects of the postcolonial border crossing of skills which is comparablewith and an extension to findings of expatriates in other Asian postcolonial cities, such as

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Jakarta (Fechter, 2005), Singapore (Beaverstock, 2002; Yeoh & Khoo, 1998), Shanghai(Farrer, 2010), and Dubai (Coles & Walsh, 2010; Walsh, 2009), among others.

The data of this study comes from in-depth interviews with skilled expatriates whocame to work in Hong Kong in the first decade after Hong Kong’s handover. They wereselected from the respondents of a larger quantitatively oriented research project that wecompleted during the period between 1 October 2007 and 30 June 2009. The aim of thatsurvey was to gather updated information on skilled migrants, both from mainland Chinaand overseas, in post-1997 Hong Kong, on their socio-demographic background,migration motivation and channels, as well as socio-cultural adaptation in Hong Kong. Atotal of 3000 mail questionnaires (750 Chinese versions aimed at mainlanders and 2250English version aimed at expatriates, both with an identical set of questions) weredistributed via the Immigration Department of HKSAR, the sole official body responsiblefor all matters relating to immigration and therefore a crucial institution linking theresearcher to respondents.2

By the end of this project, 265 completed English questionnaires had been returnedto the team.3 About 72% of the respondents were between 30 and 54 years of age andaround 21% between 18 and 29. In terms of gender distribution, two-thirds of therespondents were men and one-third were women. Overall the respondents were well-educated. Around 53% had obtained bachelor’s degrees, and 33% attained master’sdegrees. Seven percent were doctoral degree holders. About 53% were in administrativeor managerial positions and 43% were professionals with an average income well abovethat of Hong Kong’s population. This overall profile of respondents bears no majordifference with features of skilled migrants in other global cities with regard to theireducational level, types of occupation, and levels of income (Beaverstock, 2002, 2005;Beaverstock & Smith, 1996; Peixoto, 2001). However, it reveals a diverse make-up ofnationality and ethnicity among skilled expatriates not seen in colonial Hong Kong.Among the respondents, 32 different nationalities were recorded in total, although theBritish continued to be the largest cohort. In terms of ethnicity, nearly 50% reported theywere white, and the remaining 50% comprised 11 ethnicities with people from Asiancountries as the majority. The survey findings seem to imply that despite Hong Kongcontinuing to be a popular destination for skilled expatriates to work and settle, the onceBritish-dominated expatriate landscape is now getting increasingly diversified with a muchwider range of national, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. It points to, among some otherissues, the dis/continuities of British expatriates, the once ‘dominant and privileged clique’(Holdsworth, 2002, p. xiii) in the postcolonial context, and invites us to look at how theBritish-skilled expatriates were shaped by this border transformation, and the ways inwhich they responded to this shift by renegotiating their identities and practices in a newpolitical and economic situation and a redefined discourse of expatriates.4

While the above-mentioned quantitative survey helps establish a large picture ofskilled expatriates in postcolonial Hong Kong, a more detailed analysis of their experiencesand identities associated with border transformation demanded a more focused interview-based qualitative approach. Respondents were contacted following the questionnairesurvey for face-to-face interviews. A total of 23 in-depth interviews, mostly with Britishindividuals of different ages, sex, occupations, and lengths of stay in Hong Kong weresuccessfully conducted.5 These interviews were organised along the questions ofmigration motivation, type of engagement and level of embeddedness in Hong Kong,centred on the notion of borders and how their understanding and experience as

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expatriates are related to the border transformation between the UK, Hong Kong and thePRC. These narratives of our interviewees offered a richness and complexity of experiencethat the survey data alone did not convey.

The main data for the analysis that follows is made up of narratives of fourEnglishmen with different ages, lengths of stay, types of engagement, and levels ofembeddedness in Hong Kong. The four narratives should not be taken as representative ofthe full spectrum of experiences of British expatriates in postcolonial Hong Kong.Nonetheless, together they provide an effective lens through which we could see theintricate and complex factors interacting in the production and reproduction ofpostcolonial dis/continuities in transnational skilled mobility, and illustrative of ananalytical typology of postcolonial encounters of skilled expatriates in global HongKong, each of which points to a different way of experiencing and understanding ofborder crossing in the nexus of three postcolonial actors: the UK, Hong Kong and PRC.

Telling Border-crossing Stories

Alex’s story6: ‘Moving to Hong Kong is the best choice I have ever made’

Hong Kong is a very attractive place because it is just like home. There is no culturalshock. You could get off the plane and start working immediately and do not really feeltoo disorientated. (Alex, HR recruitment manager from York)

Alex was a young man aged 30, born and brought up in a village near York. Aftergraduating from university, he worked in London for seven years as a recruitmentconsultant. His girlfriend, who also worked in London as a fashion designer, was thenoffered a job to work in Guangdong as a product development manager for a Europeancompany liaising between designers in Europe and factories in China. Since this offerwas a significant promotion for his girlfriend, Alex quit his London job and followed herto China shortly after she relocated for her job. Without any technical training orbackground, Alex taught English part-time in a local college. Unhappy with his workand life in China, he decided to apply for jobs in Hong Kong. He wrote to a few HongKong-based consultancies, got interviews in three different companies and took thebest offer. He started to work as an HR recruitment manager in a British company in2008, responsible for recruiting permanent staff in the finance and banking industry.When asked what motivated him to work in Hong Kong rather than moving back toLondon, he emphasised his wish to explore the world and experience different cultures.He said:

I am thirty. From twenty-five to thirty, not married and without kids, a lot of people—especially people from my age and my background—are willing to have an adventure ifthey can find work they will do … also it is attractive to future employers if they see I’veworked abroad for two, three, four years …

At the time of interview, Alex had only been working in Hong Kong for twomonths. He was apparently happy with what he was doing and satisfied with thequality of life in Hong Kong. To him, the attractiveness of Hong Kong was more than thecareer opportunities available, though this was certainly an important part of his

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decision-making. He found that the colonial links between Hong Kong and the UK madehis life in Hong Kong much easier than in China or possibly other Asian countries. In Alex’swords, ‘for British people I think Hong Kong is more attractive because of the colonial past,more attractive compared with Singapore, Beijing or Shanghai’. He could not helpcomparing Hong Kong with London and thought ‘there are more similarities thandifferences’ between them in terms of public transportation, public services as well as theEnglish-speaking environment:

Hong Kong is just like home. It’s like London, except all the buildings are a bit taller. Andit’s slightly busier … here the majority of people I speak to speak very good English, thepeople I work with speak perfect English … I will say Hong Kong is as easy to adapt to, asin London.

Alex recalled in particular the excitement when he first visited Hong Kong fromChina. He was amazed by the variety of British and Western food available in Hong Kong’ssupermarkets. He described how excited he was when he found English teabags in HongKong’s shops:

The first thing I did in here, I went to the supermarket, I could find English teabags, Icould find English, French, Spanish products that you couldn’t find in the mainland(China). So moving to Hong Kong is the best choice I have ever made.

If it was English teabags that made Alex feel at home, Hong Kong’s cosmopolitanculture was also attractive to his girlfriend. When she was in Guangdong, according toAlex, her blonde hair and pale skin invited constant attention on the streets. Some peopleeven took photos of her, intruding on her privacy and making her violated by theemphasis that others placed on her different appearance. In Hong Kong, nobody did thesethings to her any more. She felt like ‘just another normal person in the streets’.

As a former British colony and a global city, Hong Kong has a sizable and long-standing expatriate community. British and other Western expatriates tended to reside inhigh priced and prestigious residential areas, such as Mid-level and Happy Valley, with theluxury of space and comfort. After work, they tended to hang out in places like Lan KwaiFong, a popular night life resort with a high concentration of pubs catering to Westerncustomers (Lin, 2002a, 2002b). Alex was clearly impressed by and benefitted from theexistence of such an expatriate community, saying that ‘it’s fabulous that there’s lots ofWesterners out here. It’s more like “the society in the society”’. He told us that he found hisaccommodation from a website that provided advice for newcomers about variousaspects of Hong Kong, such as information on housing, shopping and leisure activities. Hesimply searched the website, found the relevant information and called a man who waslooking for a roommate. They got along, went for a drink and agreed to shareaccommodation. It seems that despite the fact that Hong Kong has become part ofChina, in terms of how the city is ruled and people’s lifestyles, Hong Kong remains the cityit used to be in the late colonial period:

The mentality of expats, especially British, regards Hong Kong pretty much as it operatedbefore 1997, the way the economy works, how the government treats its citizens, not likein the communist regime. So that’s most of my experience, that Hong Kong economicallyand culturally is still very different from the mainland. Not sure if there will be moreintegration but in the last ten years not much changed.

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Towards the end of the interview, Alex revealed that his boss came to Hong Kongwith the British Army in the 1970s, and then when he retired from the Army, decided tostay. He got married and raised his children in Hong Kong. He started his company in themid 1980s, and over the years developed it from a modest HR office into a largeinternational company with different divisions. After so many years in Hong Kong, with asuccessful career and family, he had never returned to the UK. It was unknown to whatextent this British connection with his boss helped Alex find his Hong Kong job. However,it was clear that his boss’s story had inspired him and his girlfriend in planning their future.At the time of interview, Alex’s girlfriend had already decided to join him in Hong Kongand was looking for a job in the fashion industry. He revealed that they planned to getmarried and have children in the near future. When asked how long they wanted to stay inHong Kong, he mentioned his boss’s story again and hinted that what had happened tohis boss could possibly also happen to him and others of his generation:

He doesn’t see England as home anymore. The only reason he goes home is to visit hisfather, and his father came over to watch the Hong Kong Sevens … if things go well, thesame will happen to us.

David’s story: ‘It is a little bit like home actually, just the humidity’

Is Hong Kong very different since 1997? Not really I think, certainly in the eyes of anEnglish person per se, given England’s history with Hong Kong … Well, there hasobviously been change, but I don’t necessarily think that an Englishman like me wouldthink it has been changed at all. It hasn’t changed as far as I can see then that much.(David, a banker from London)

David was a London-based banker in his late 30s. He was transferred from hisLondon company’s headquarter to Hong Kong in 2008. His employer used to work inHong Kong and elsewhere in Asia in the 1980s. He wanted to open a Hong Kong officebecause he believed that that was where business was developing. He used his contacts inHong Kong to set up an office and asked if David would like to head it. The importance ofHong Kong to his company’s business was more than obvious:

The financial community has a focus on Asia in general. Obviously from a macroperspective, Asia is booming: whether it be the financial world, manufacturing industry,commodities, and China particularly with the massive growth. … And the centre of thefinancial world is either Singapore or Hong Kong. Singapore is catching up with HongKong fast, but Hong Kong is probably still the centre of it at the moment … and that’sgoing to continue. Here is the place you have to have some sort of a base, which is whythey pay all those expense and sending me here to help build up the office … it’s easierto set up in Hong Kong than it is to set up in China. Yet you’re part of China, you can tapin to the wealth that’s being created in China; you’re centrally located to, say, Australiaand everywhere else in Asia.

This job offer was appealing to David for both professional and cultural reasons. Thetransfer gave him more responsibilities and a higher salary. He also thought it would begood for his children to experience different cultures and a different part of the world.After weighing everything, he took the offer without hesitation.

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David made his first visit to Hong Kong in the mid-1990s when he went there onvacation with his wife. When he moved to work there in 2008, he found that Hong Kongwas still the fantastic place it used to be. Like Alex, David also found many similaritiesbetween Hong Kong and London. The bus, ambulance, fire station and the traffic rules, forexample, though tinted with local colours, were all clearly in line with ‘British standards’,producing a feeling of familiarity and nostalgia to an Englishman like him. In the eyes ofDavid, Hong Kong was bizarrely like home ‘except for the weather’:

There’s been no very off-putting experience at all, and consequently we’re very happyhere. No major cultural differences. You see a lot of similarities to England … if you lookaround, clearly a lot of the infrastructures here are built to the British standard, so yousee the buses, the fire station, the ambulances, a lot of the systems are British systems,all, with a bit slightly differences. You know, the same side of the vehicle, same side ofthe road. So you know, it’s very sensible; from an Englishman’s perspective, it’s very easyto adapt … It’s a little bit like home actually, just the humidity.

Apart from the familiarities in infrastructure and urban planning, David also foundparallels and continuities between Hong Kong and UK at the institutional level, which hethought was especially helpful from a business perspective. The ‘one country, two systems’framework permits Hong Kong to maintain its Common Law system and continue to issueits own currency and govern its own financial operations. In other words, despite thepolitical handover, Hong Kong’s legal and financial structures, both of which weremodelled on British systems, remained largely unchanged. This institutional continuityenabled British businessmen to transfer their knowledge and experience to Hong Kongwithout any major barriers or personal psychological costs. When asked to compare hisexperience of dealing with the FSA (Financial Service Authority, the UK regular of itsfinancial industry) with the SFC (its counterpart in Hong Kong), David made suchcomments:

Very similar, I would think they are modelled on one another. There are an awful lot ofsimilarities in the hoops they make you jump through, the administration, the paperwork… In the website they set out in the same way, even the terminologies they give you,though perhaps SFC may be a few years behind the FSA, but it is catching up …

compared with what I experienced in India, I think it’s so much easier to deal with theHong Kong rules and regulations, which are very similar to the UK. That makes it mucheasier for people like me who come from the company based in the UK market.

However, the institutional parallels between Hong Kong and UK did not comewithout a cost. As with several other interviewees, David found that Hong Kong’s workinghours were much longer than in the UK. At first, he attributed this time difference to‘cultural shock’, but then realised that, beyond cultural differences, it referred to differentunderstandings of work ethics between Hong Kong and the UK. Fundamentally, in hisview, it was the result of the disadvantaged position of Hong Kong and Asia as theperiphery/subordinate in the unequal power relations with the world economic centre inEuro-America:

The perception is: in Asia, if you work for a European company, then they’re theheadquarters, so they make the decisions, and we have to bend to their decision, whichis true … I found that quite interesting because in London and Europe and New York you

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don’t think about the time difference. I get invited to conference calls in London at threeo’clock in the morning: ‘Oh, please can you come to this conference call?’ I was like, ‘It’sthree o’clock in the morning!’ I’m not awake, but in the morning, I’ll say I didn’t replybecause it was three o’clock in the morning, and they just go, ‘Oh, we didn’t think aboutthat’. Because as far as they’re concerned, they’re the centre of everything, and we justhave to work for their timings.

Despite the longer working hours, David and his family enjoyed living in Hong Kong.They found an apartment at Pokfulam, a place he dubbed ‘“expat central” where all theexpats live’. They socialised with other expats living in the same area and frequentedshops in Aberdeen where many of the expats sold their used appliances in fairly goodconditions and at reasonable prices. His wife, a schoolteacher back in England, was lookingafter their three children, aged seven, four and two years, respectively. She would soonwork as a part-time teacher in the international school where they send their children to,staffed by teachers from the UK, Australia, Canada and other English-speaking countries.Their children were also happy with the new school and educational environment, whichapparently was not much different to their school in England. He told us that ‘none of usmissed the UK’, and continued,

I think overall, it’s a fabulous place to live and work. I have no intention to leave in ahurry. I’m very pleased that I made the decision to come when they offered it to me, Ithink it is fascinating.

Compared with a young explorer like Alex, David certainly had more things to takeinto account in considering his move to Hong Kong. However, like many other well-paidtransferees in the financial sector of global cities, David and his family were enjoying atransnational life style which promised a bright career future and richer life experience,both for himself and his family. Asked about long-term planning, David framed his nextmove to somewhere else or back to England after a five-year period to correspond withthe time at which his seven-year-old child should be entering secondary school. However,if his work in Hong Kong went well, he thought that he and his family would probablycontinue to stay in Hong Kong. ‘Why not?’, as he asked.

Andrew’s story: ‘It is astonishing … that we get treated incredibly well’

I found it astonishing that, considering the pain we gave your country over 150 years, weget treated incredibly well! It’s astonishing, I mean, thank you. (Andrew, an Englishteacher from Bristol)

Andrew was about 40 years old, originally from Bristol, England. He moved to HongKong in 1998 through an internal transfer within the British Council. He had been teachingEnglish in Central Asia and then was offered an opportunity to work in East Asia. Heeventually decided on Hong Kong, the best of the offers in terms of both financial returnand career prospects. According to him, the British Council in Hong Kong was one of thebiggest and best organised centres to work for in the English-teaching community. Twoyears later, he left to join a self-financed language centre attached to a local university,teaching professional business English to Hong Kong Chinese. Apart from teaching,he also took on some middle-level management duties, such as recruiting and training

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part-time staff, finding business opportunities, meeting clients, organising courses andproviding course material and so on.

By the time of the interview, Andrew had been working and living in Hong Kong forover 10 years. He was generally happy with his position as a language teacher and anEnglishman in Hong Kong despite the change in Hong Kong’s sovereignty.

I’m basically very happy here. And despite ‘one country, two systems’, it seems to workvery well. I’m not worried about any threat from the mainland or anything like that. Orperhaps if I lived in South Korea then I would be more worried … as far as I can see I willbe here until I retire.

Unlike Alex and David who were happy with the convenience of the English-speaking environment of Hong Kong, Andrew regretted his lack of command of the locallanguage and his inability to understand what was going on around him. Compared withhis previous working experience in other countries where he learnt and used the locallanguage comfortably without too many difficulties, he felt that he would never be able toacquire fluency in Cantonese, not, in his view, because Cantonese was linguisticallychallenging, but because it was unnecessary for an Englishman to learn it in order to liveand work in Hong Kong. As he said, ‘one of the reasons why my Cantonese has never gotbetter is because from day to day it’s not something you actually need! It’s something youwanted to do, but it’s not something you really need to do’.

In fact, Andrew was aware of his privilege as a European man, and particularly anEnglishman in Hong Kong. To his surprise, although he could not communicate with localpeople in Cantonese effectively after having lived there for a decade, which he ‘felt [was]really embarrassing’, he found Hong Kong people did not care about that and treated him‘astonishingly’ well. This was how he described to us (mainland and Hong Kong Chinese)his personal experience of being an Englishman in Hong Kong and being a Westernerin Asia:

I don’t speak the language … but that does not necessarily mean anyone treats mebadly. It’s really interesting, the situation experienced as, particularly, a European here,more so a native English speaker, perhaps even more so as being English. Actually, Ifound it astonishing that, considering the pain we gave your country over 150 years, weget treated incredibly well! It’s astonishing, I mean, thank you. 150 years of bad, andpeople say ‘Oh you’re from England! Fantastic, Manchester United!’, and no one eversaid, ‘You bastard, you took over our country for 150 years’. You never get anything likethat. It’s extremely rare that I’ve ever get any kind of negative ‘Chi Sin Gweilow’ (sillyforeigners, author’s note) kind of thing. It’s very, very rare that you get any kind ofnegative reaction like that. I mean, compared to if you’re Asian living in Europe, it’s a verydifferent experience.

Andrew had lived in Hong Kong long enough to take Hong Kong seriously as hishome. He had bought a village house in Lamma, a small island that is a 30-minute ferryride away from Hong Kong’s Central, and lived with his Hong Kong Chinese girlfriend. Heacknowledged that he had no plan to live in the UK again. He had effectively redefinedand re-configured his geographical, cultural and psychological sense of home andbelonging.

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I don’t talk about going … Hong Kong is home. A lot of people have lived here for yearsbut still talk about ‘going home’, meaning going to visit England for two weeks a year.What is that? You live here 50 weeks a year. England is not home, this is your home. Thisis my home when I am in England when I talk about going home I mean going back toHong Kong. I talk about visiting England; I never talk about visiting home.

However, Andrew admitted that he would never regard himself as a full member ofHong Kong society. Instead, he felt he belonged to Lamma where he could have a ‘senseof community’. He liked the joy of seeing his Chinese neighbours when he opened thefront door in the morning; he knew many local people in the village, and some of his closefriends were also living on the island. Lamma is where he could acquire a cultural balancebetween being an Englishman and a Hong Konger, and between being local and global:

It’s good that it has the variety, that’s great, but I wouldn’t want it to be any more‘expaty’ than it actually is. It’s quite a nice balance, Lamma’s got a great balance: you’vestill got the fishing village there, you’ve got lots of old grannies, older people who stillfarm the land, and then you’ve got bankers. I mean, that is a real, real, real variety, andthat’s one of the great things being out there. And the communities are—I wouldn’t sayhugely integrated—but they get on absolutely fine.

When asked about his future plans, Andrew expressed his wish to retire inHong Kong:

I am thirty-nine now, twenty one years until I retire; I don’t have a clear plan at themoment, I am trying to think about five years into the future, it’s difficult to think abouttwenty years into the future, and I’m going to be here for the rest of my working life,quite possibly.

Alan’s story: ‘Hong Kong is no longer a suburb of the UK’

The local population are waking up that this is their country, no longer a suburb of theUK. (Alan, a businessman from London)

Alan was a businessman in his mid-50s, originally from London. He first went toHong Kong in 1986, and then in 1997, both times for a news agent company. Each time,he stayed for two and three years, looking after the distribution and sales of financialmarket data, news and other information. In 2004, he moved to Hong Kong for the thirdtime but for a different mission, commissioned by a British company to start a newbusiness in Asia. Being a third-time visitor, Alan knew Hong Kong’s migration policy,financial regulations and tax system well enough to facilitate his business endeavours. Hearrived in Hong Kong as a visitor with a British passport which allowed him to stay in HongKong legally for a maximum of six months. During this period, he set up a company andemployed himself through the company. By doing this, he obtained a working visa via theGeneral Employment Scheme so that he could stay on as a skilled immigrant for a longerperiod. He found all this very easy, perhaps, because, according to him, ‘I have been hereso many times, the immigration and the tax people know me already, and they gave me along tax record. Or maybe they are simply kind to me’.

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Despite the political changes in Hong Kong, Alan thought, from a businessperspective, that ‘Hong Kong still has its edge, a huge edge. It’s really the place, THEplace … Hong Kong’s just ahead of anyone else in Asia, in our time zone’. The realstrength of Hong Kong, from his point of view, was the combination of a very efficientlegal system, financial market, and processing of visas for people to gain entry for work,regardless of where they might be from. ‘So you can get people from the mainland in, youcan get Filipinos, you get Indians, anybody in. I think that’s a huge strength for HongKong’. With large numbers of skilled migrants bringing in new skills, the skills level in HongKong has continued to increase, enabling local people to become familiar with ‘how to dothings internationally’. He believed that the return of Hong Kong to China had notweakened, but ironically enhanced Hong Kong’s role as an Asian and world financialcentre because Hong Kong played a pivotal role in bridging the Chinese market and theworld economy. China’s economic boom significantly strengthened Hong Kong’s role inmediating for the Western companies that intended to engage with China.

Hong Kong has been brilliant in maintaining a leadership position for the listing offoreign companies and particularly mainland companies. So they all list on the HongKong Stock Exchange. If you’re investing in the market, you buy it through Hong Kong;you don’t do it in China. And that applies through the whole financial industry.

Notwithstanding Hong Kong’s continuing importance and attractiveness to interna-tional skills, Alan also felt that Hong Kong had changed in ways not mentioned oracknowledged by Alex, David, and Andrew. First, he found the ‘mood’ towards Westernexpatriates had changed. While Western expatriates were still welcomed, they were nowregarded less favourably than locals in the job market. More and more jobs now tended tobe filled by local people; when expatriates were hired, they were mostly hired on localterms rather than on the previous generous expatriate terms that covered children’seducation, house allowance, and airfares back to the UK for annual holidays in addition tosalaries. The ‘blank cheque’ expatriate package given to transferees before the handoversimply did not exist anymore.

Now it’s a bit different because the mood, quite naturally, is that they would rather uselocal talent and local people, and a lot of the jobs they’re trying to encourage are filledby local people. And so you tend to find a lot of obstacles in the way for, say, an expat oran immigrant, to get into work, even for professionals’ standards.

In addition, he recognised the increasing popularity of Mandarin among HongKongers, especially the younger generation. In the 1980s nobody spoke Mandarin apartfrom the new immigrants from mainland China, and Mandarin was invariably associatedwith notions of poverty, backwardness and a communist threat. Now Alan found thatalmost all high street shop assistants spoke Mandarin with reasonable fluency, which wasunimaginable in the colonial period. The downside of this, however, was that the level ofEnglish proficiency among the new local university graduates was worse than during the1980s, which was annoying to foreign businessmen like him who sometimes had to findpeople from overseas to take on the international roles in their business. However, thisproblem was to some extent solved or alleviated by the return of a new generation ofoverseas Hong Kongers who followed their families to Western countries prior to 1997 andgrew up in English-speaking countries. They had now returned with fluent English and a

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global world view. Overall, he thought the quality of Hong Kong’s young generation washigher than the 1980s because of the world view they now had:

They’re more aware of global trends, they are keen to benchmark themselves againstAmerica or whoever is the leader in the process, and that’s good. That’s really good.That’s a very good sign to me because what you want is the best possible people … Youknow, many of these people with their Australian passports and so on are back here now.That’s good. It’s really good for Hong Kong, and very good for employers. Because thesepeople come back not only with their English skills but with a whole broader outlook,different benchmarks, real, first hand benchmarks. That’s really good.

To Alan and many other old-timers, Hong Kong unavoidably invoked complicatedfeelings and emotions. On the one hand, Hong Kong was still the place to seek economicopportunities, chase old dreams and embark on new adventures. On the other,unavoidably, it had changed. Alan said to us that he could totally understand thesechanges and ‘had absolutely no unpleasantness whatsoever’. However, his words and toneindicated a certain sense of loss: ‘I think it is indicative of the fact that the local populationare waking up that this is their country, no longer of a suburb of the UK’.

Discussion

The movement of British expatriates to Hong Kong, as shown in each of thesestories, was embedded explicitly in pre-existing social and institutional linkages and powerrelations between Hong Kong and the UK produced in the colonial past and reproduced inthe postcolonial present:

British expatriates arrive in Hong Kong to inherit a particular nationality-basedrelationship to the legacy of raced, classed and gendered attitudes, identities andrelations which were constructed during the colonial period … (and) ways in whichnotions of hierarchy and social order framed the colonial imagination, and as suchinformed the mundane routines of everyday interactions. (Leonard, 2010, p. 1260)

We focus on the narratives of four Englishmen. The discussion of Englishness inrelation to border crossing is nevertheless, in many ways, intertwined with and embeddedin the multiple-level raced and classed relations fabricated by the whole history of Britishrule in Hong Kong. Englishness, despite all the conflation it may have with Britishness,which is beyond the scale of this research, provides a focal point for discussing andreflecting on the complicated nature of border in postcolonial discourse. Due to thelimited space of this paper, the gender aspect of border crossing is only briefly covered,mostly through narrating interviewees’ relationships with their wives or partners in theprocess of migration and settlement. Detailed analyses of gender issues, notably genderdifferences associated with the intersection of border crossing driven by professionalambitions with the planning of marriage and starting a family, await further research.

The four English men revoked and manipulated a historically formed legacy, eitherconsciously (as in the case of Alan) or unconsciously (as in the case of Alex), to facilitatetheir travelling and dwelling in post-1997 Hong Kong. For Alex, it was embodied in theretired British army officer who hired him and influenced his planning of his own future. Inthe case of David, the opening of the Hong Kong office and his subsequent transfer to

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Hong Kong would not have been possible without his boss’s knowledge of and priorconnections with Hong Kong as a result of his earlier working experience in Asia. ForAndrew, it was the British Council network that brought him to Hong Kong in the firstplace. And in the case of Alan, his back-and-forth journeys between the UK and HongKong over a span of 20 years provided him with valuable knowledge of colonial HongKong that enabled him to start a new adventure in this postcolonial global city. Behindconcrete social linkages experienced by individual expatriates are the parallels betweenthe legal, economic, and social structures of Hong Kong and the UK at the institutionallevel. Despite having become part of the PRC, Hong Kong’s legal, financial and educationalsystems, all of which are modelled on British systems, remain structurally unchanged. Thishistorically formed institutional continuity implicitly facilitates British bankers’, traders’,teachers’ and other skilled migrants’ continuous engagement with Hong Kong despite allthe changes taking place along the political borders. This institutional connectivity wasfurther maintained and strengthened by the global power relations beyond the place ofHong Kong that continue to privilege the West over the East. Fifteen years after HongKong’s reversion to the PRC, ‘Hong Kong was still the place to be’, in the words of Alanwho crossed the border at different points in time in its recent constitution, in terms of itsrole as the gateway through which British and Western expatriates reach out andcoordinate smaller financial markets in the Asia-Pacific region in a Euro-American-centricglobal political economy. As David reminds us, Hong Kong still has to ‘work for theirtimings’.

These stories showcase ‘how racial hierarchies and power inequalities persist, as wellas how they are being reconfigured and challenged’ (Fechter & Walsh, 2010, p. 1198) bothin the specific postcolonial context of HK, and elsewhere, where assumptions about theeconomic characteristics and transient nature of skilled migration continues to dominateand homogenise our understanding of skilled mobilities. However, the understandingsand experiences of border crossing by the four Englishmen are certainly not the same. Thestories presented here suggest an analytical typology of positions, each of which point toa different perception and practice of border crossing in postcolonial Hong Kong. The firsttype is what perhaps could be called ‘blind followers’ as seen particularly in the story ofAlex. He showed extraordinary apparent ‘oblivion’ or ‘blindness’ to the inherited ‘realities’of racialised social and cultural hierarchies, represented in the dominant position ofEnglish in Hong Kong as a linguistic marker of social status and spatially as well as sociallyin the ‘levels’ of residence of expatriate community in places like Mid-level and Lan KwaiFong where the former colonisers used to live and hang out and are now populatedmostly by British and other Western expatriates. Alex and, to a lesser extent, the otherinterviewees frequently mentioned Hong Kong’s English speaking environment as asignificant factor in making working and living in Hong Kong almost as easy as ‘at home’.In the words of Alex, ‘it’s like London, except all the buildings are a bit taller’. People in thiscategory tend to take for granted all the advantages and comfort that Englishmen couldhave in Hong Kong. They showed no interest in learning the local language, which in theirterms is apparently unnecessary, or to mix with the local Chinese population, in a way notvery different from the ex-colonisers. They continued to stay with the expatriatecommunity, the ‘society in the society’, as it is described by Alex, spatialised in HongKong’s urban geography. It is quite astonishing to hear Alex say that ‘there is no culturalshock’ for him to be in Hong Kong. This apparent disregard/ignorance of the cultural andracial hierarchy in Hong Kong speaks very powerfully as a silence, or a denial, to the

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inequality produced by British colonisation, and a resistance, consciously or unconsciously,to the decolonisation that is taking place, and a desire to continuously exploit racialisedadvantages as long as possible, to the point of repeating the ‘successful’ story of his bosswho has built his whole career based on his encountering Hong Kong as a colonial armyofficer.

The second position in this spectrum could be called the ‘nostalgic elites’, asrepresented by David, the middle-aged banker coming from London through an intra-company transfer, the typical form of expatriates depicted in mainstream literature. Whatmakes the narrative of David more complicated and interesting, however, is a strong senseof nostalgia of the colonial past behind his and his family’s relocation to and settlement inHong Kong. Unlike Alex who ignored, deliberately or otherwise, the decolonisation ofHong Kong, David acknowledged that Hong Kong had already changed. However, he didnot necessarily think, ‘an Englishman like me would think it has been changed at all’. Thisis not so much about the material comfort and convenience continuously made availableto Western expatriates like him living in the prestigious ‘expat central’ or the internationalschools that could offer his children English education in the same way as in England.What comforted David most and led him to stay is an irresistible (post)colonialimagination in which he had mixed feelings of sadness about losing Hong Kong to Chinaand satisfaction about his actual enjoyment of a privileged elite life almost in the samestyle as in the colonial period. The material fabric and living expectations of the city, fromright-hand drive vehicles, English-language street signs, double-decker buses and postoffices, fire stations and hospitals built in a colonial British style, consistently produced acultural illusion that the colonial period was still ongoing and that it was not going to endany time soon. The nostalgia of the colonial past blurs the boundary of time and spacebetween the colonial and postcolonial. It provides David and many other middle-agedelites who have experienced the transfer of Hong Kong in 1997 with an imaginative spacein which they could continue to image and live out something called ‘Britishness’ in boththe workplace and household.

The third is what we call ‘reflective hermits’ as represented by Andrew. After havinglived in Hong Kong for a decade he began to observe the change of Hong Kong from alocal perspective and in a more reflective manner. He felt increasingly ‘embarrassed’, if not‘guilty’, about being unable to speak the local language and uneasy with the racialised andgendered social and cultural inequality inherited from the colonial past. His self-reflexivecomments on the pain that colonialism has brought to Hong Kong revealed his awarenessof the dark side of colonial rule. Unlike Alex and David who showed no interest in mixingwith local society and culture, Andrew tried to engage with and understand local Chinesesociety and people as much as possible. However, he also realised that he would neverbecome a ‘full member’ of Hong Kong society because of a lingering racialised cultural andsocial hierarchy not only in the minds of the British but also in the mentality of many localChinese who seemed to take for granted the hegemonic meaning ascribed to Britishnessand treated ex-colonisers bizarrely ‘astonishingly well’. His decision to settle down inLamma Island, far away from the residential areas of Western expatriates (a symboliccentre of colonialism) could perhaps be read as a gesture of deliberate retreat from thecentre to the periphery as a way to reflect upon assumed British hegemony and to find anew way to be British in the future.

The last is what could be called ‘sophisticated realists’, best represented by Alan.These are individuals who had worked in colonial Hong Kong on a short-term basis at

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different points of their careers, and returned to postcolonial Hong Kong to search for newopportunities. The multiple border crossing experience made it possible for Alan tocapitalise on his local knowledge of Hong Kong and the connections he had alreadyaccumulated, and more importantly, provided him with a unique angle to understand theshifted power relations at a broader scale and at a much deeper level. As described byAlan, challenges to the inherited power disequilibrium were taking place on a daily basisand almost everywhere. They are demonstrated in the rising popularity of Mandarin, thechange of ‘mood’ in the Hong Kong job market, and the gradual removal of ‘expat terms’as described by Alan and experienced by many of the interviewees. The British were stillwelcomed as both manpower and a symbol of Hong Kong’s global city-ness. However, inreality, the British had to compete for jobs with ambitious mainland professionals whocame to Hong Kong in larger numbers after the handover and were employed by HongKong’s local and international companies as a bridge to the booming Chinese market(Wang, 2012), a younger generation of Hong Kongers who had returned from the Westand were equipped with international know-how (Fong, 2012; Salaff, Shik, & Greve, 2008),and skilled migrants from other Asian countries (although skilled migrant groups otherthan the British are not the central focus of this paper). The once ‘blank cheque’ allowanceas part of the generous ‘expatriate package’ in the colonial time past is gone forever, asrevealed by our interviews and verified by other studies (Leonard, 2008, 2010). In thewords of Alan, ‘the local population are waking up … this is no longer a suburb of the UK’,to which, he ‘had absolutely no unpleasantness whatsoever’. His composure is in sharpcontrast with the apparent detachment from or ignorance as in the case of Alex, romanticnostalgia of David and self-imposed retreat of Andrew. While others are living in the pastor stuck in the present, he simply accepted the reality and quickly moved on. As an old-timer who had experienced or at least witnessed the rise and fall of the British empire inHong Kong and elsewhere, he understood that ‘empire survives as a feeling of choice andopportunities, (divergent) forms of entitlement, facilitated by a (racialised) geography ofroutes already carved out and traversed by others’ (Knowles, 2005, p. 107). What we see inAlan is indeed another form of lingering colonialism. As argued by Baas (2012, p. 25),‘colonialism cannot (ever) simply be put to rest. The influence of colonialism, on both sidesof the divide (coloniser vs. colonised), is always there, one way or the other, having shapedour present and influencing that what is yet to come’.

Conclusion

The Union Jack has been replaced by the Five-star Red Flag. The travel of Britishexpatriates to Hong Kong continues but exhibits new forms of mobility and identities. Thisstudy testifies to the highly contested nature of border crossing and place-making that iscentral to understanding skilled mobility. In formulating the notion of ‘postcolonial bordercrossing’, we argue that the contemporary skilled migration in Hong Kong and elsewhereis neither an ahistorical nor homogeneous phenomenon. Their movements to Hong Kongare deeply shaped by and are shaping the border transformation between the UK, HongKong and the PRC, and exhibit multiple postcolonial experiences and diverse identities.

The movement of British expatriates to post-1997 Hong Kong was played out withinthe economic and geopolitical nexus of three interrelated state actors: the UK (the ex-coloniser), Hong Kong (the de/re/colonised) and the PRC (the neo-coloniser). All threewere involved in renegotiating with each other in a shifted power relationship in order to

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reconstruct a new border that reshuffles, rearranges and rebalances the past social andcultural relations, politics and identities in the present. The British, the once predominantand privileged expatriates, now have to compete and cohabit with the locally growntalent, diasporic Chinese returning to Hong Kong, mainland Chinese professionals, as wellas other expatriate groups of Asian origin. The British, Hong Kong people, and mainlanderChinese are all ‘postcolonial subjects’ in the sense that they are intersected in theproduction and reproduction of new political, social and cultural borders. Such interactionsinclude frequent crossing of the boundaries of the given roles of coloniser and colonised,and incessant negotiation between the past and present, demonstrated in the reflectionsmade by the (British) interviewees to the (Chinese) interviewers on languages, culturalidentity and business future. In this sense, the border crossing of skills is both embeddedin previous power relations and constructive of a new power geometry and transformscontemporary skilled migration.

Narratives of our interviewees unveil highly ‘fractured’ (Bhattacharya & Jayesh, 2011,p. 4) post/colonial identities as a result of migrants’ multiple interpretations andnegotiations with the colonial past, mediated by different biographies, positioning andunderstandings of border and place. At one end are the young ‘blind followers’ whoconsciously or unconsciously disregarded/denied the racial inequality inherited from thecolonial past, and hailed and exploited the advantages of being British, representing thepersistence of an imperial mentality that continued to image post-1997 Hong Kongthrough a Western-centric colonial discourse. At the far end are the more realistic andsophisticated ‘old-timers’ who had a lucid gaze of the power relations which have shiftedin postcolonial Hong Kong, accepting the changes, no matter to their liking or not, andengaging proactively with the new reality in the hope of putting on their new influence inthe making of future. In the middle are ‘nostalgic elites’ who could not help but continueliving out the lingering illusion of the ‘good old days’ of colonialism, and the ‘reflectivehermits’ who consciously retreat to the social margins to reflect upon and challenge thenotions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Whiteness’ as framed by an imperial lens. These fourprototypes of British expatriates are by no means the complete spectrum of identitiesand practices of British expatriates in postcolonial Hong Kong. Rather, taken together theyillustrate the multiplicity of postcolonial encounters in which individual expatriates helddifferent subject positions and practices. The prototypes presented here are neither fixednor mutually exclusive. One may switch from one position to another or end up in ahybrid position contingent on the time and place. As argued by Knowles (2005), Britishexpatriates in postcolonial Hong Kong are struggling to find a way to reconfigureBritishness or Whiteness, the meaning of which is no longer guaranteed but open tocontestation and negotiation.

This Hong Kong-based empirical study calls for a research agenda that could attendto the dis/continuity of skilled migration and critically analyse the meaning of border aswell as the ways it is transformed and transforming skilled mobility. It extends the recentdevelopment in the study of skilled migration by adding a ‘border’ perspective thatattempts to integrate the political, social and economic spheres as well as to connect thepast and the present in the same framework of analysis. Future projects on skilledexpatriates in a wider range of case studies across Asian cities and with a more nuancedanalysis of gender differences and conflation between different national/ethnic groupsunder the overarching label ‘Whiteness’ will reveal more insights. This study also informspolicy making in the field of skilled migration, which has long been narrowly focused on

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the sphere of economic activities rather than issues of political entities, racial relations,cultural hierarchies, heritage and identities associated with border crossing, which areequally important in the understanding and regulation of transnational skills to and fromglobal cities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC code: HKU

7013-PPR-4) that funded this research project and Ernest Lau for his efficient research

assistance. Harriet Evans and Helen Rowley read early drafts and offered helpful advice.

Our thanks also go to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and

constructive comments. The most gratitude goes to the interviewees who shared with us

their stories without which this paper will not be possible.

NOTES

1. ‘Expatriate’ is a contested term that mostly refers to white, Western skilled migrants

working in developing countries or former colonies. It was also the term that our

interviewees used to identify themselves in relation to the local population of Hong

Kong. In this paper, it is used in a broader sense to refer to skilled migrants from the

West and other countries to Hong Kong vis-à-vis the local talents and professional

migrants from mainland China.2. In conformity to the Private Data Ordinance, the Immigration Department did not release

its databank of highly skilled migrants to the research team for sample selection. It

instead distributed the questionnaires to respondents on behalf of the research team in

two ways. One was to distribute to the approved applicants directly, the other was to

distribute to the applicants indirectly through the Human Resources Department of their

employers when they came to its office to apply for or renew working permits for the

recruited skilled migrants. All mail survey questionnaires were sent back to us directly.

The Immigration Department did not take part in this research.3. Discussion of data related to the mainland Chinese professionals has already been

published somewhere else (Wang, 2012). This paper focuses on British-skilled expatri-

ates only.4. Western expatriates of other nationalities in Hong Kong, like in other former British

colonies, have tended to share the collective expatriate identity and imperial imagination

ascribed to the British in terms of relationships with borders and locality despite not

having been formal subjects of British colonial rule. We therefore decided to focus on the

British expatriates, who are also the largest cohort of all respondents.5. The interviews were mostly conducted in the offices of the interviewees, with average

length of about one hour. English was the language used in all interviews. The first

author, with a mainland Chinese background, participated in the initial stage of

interviews and Ernest Lau, a Hong Kong Chinese and also one of the members of the

original survey research, completed the major part. All interviews were tape-recorded

with the advance agreement of the interviewees and were subsequently transcribed for

analysis.

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6. All names of interviewees are pseudonyms throughout the paper. To protect confiden-

tiality we changed some of the details of their stories where necessary.

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Wang Cangbai (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Departmentof Modern Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities,University of Westminster, London, UK. Email: [email protected]

Wong Siu-lun, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University ofHong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong.

Victor Zheng, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University ofHong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong.

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