Before my recent student exchange trip to Hong Kong, a classmate from Hong Kong said something that stayed with me: “Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore.” At the time, I wasn’t sure what she meant.
On our first two days, the city looked as I had imagined it. The streets of Mong Kok were alive with vendors. I could hear Cantonese, Australian-accented English, and Tagalog at crosswalks. The skyline was still lit with the same neon signs that had once enchanted me through Wong Kar-Wai’s films. Even in our meetings with business leaders, the message was clear and reassuring: despite Beijing’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong since 2019, the imposition of the National Security Law, and the mass exodus of local residents, it’s back to business as usual in Hong Kong.
However, on our third day, that façade cracked. We visited Hong Kong University, where I came across the Democracy Wall – a place intended for students to express their opinions freely. It was blank. The only posting was a list of rules: to share a message, you must submit your student ID, comply with the laws of Hong Kong, and accept surveillance. Two security cameras hung above the board. The Democracy Wall wasn’t defaced or removed – just empty, silently repurposed.
In that moment, I realized what my classmate meant. Hong Kong looked normal, but something at its core had been hollowed out.
This is the paradox of Hong Kong in 2025. The lights are on, the subway is running on time, and the shops are bustling. But the places where people once had the freedom to voice dissent – the parks, the streets, even the student bulletin boards – are now quiet.
During our trip, we met with journalists and academics who spoke with deliberate caution. They described how, in the years following the 2019 anti-extradition protests, nearly all prominent pro-democracy figures had been arrested or forced into exile. As of 2024, more than 100 civil society groups have since disbanded. Even research on public opinion – once considered a politically neutral subject – came under scrutiny, forcing the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute to shut down its research activity. Protests, once a hallmark of the city’s political culture, have become rare and highly regulated, requiring authority permission to take place.
For Hong Kongers who remain, the sentiment is quiet perseverance. Life goes on, but always under the government’s watch.
Yet the silence is not just political – it is demographic. In the wake of political unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic, Hong Kong has experienced a major population shift. The net outflow of 291,000 residents since 2020 marked the city’s largest exodus in recent history. Many of those leaving are young, educated Hong Kongers – professionals, students, activists – those with the most to lose and the most reason to hope elsewhere.
In their place, a new wave is arriving: high-skilled migrants from mainland China, drawn by government schemes such as the Top Talent Pass Scheme (TTPS). Launched in late 2022, TTPS received over 100,000 applications in its first six months, with approximately 95 percent of approved applicants hailing from the mainland.
With an aging and shrinking local workforce, Hong Kong’s government is recalibrating the city’s economic strategy. New infrastructure projects like the Northern Metropolis and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, the world’s longest crossing, signal a push for deeper integration with China’s southern economic zone. Demographic shift is accompanied by spatial and institutional alignment.
Beijing’s crackdown has chilled overt dissent, but it has not erased the city’s distinctiveness entirely. In conversations with locals, I sensed not resignation, but caution – a collective effort to hold onto what remains: Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan culture, an institutional heritage, and the rule of law. But as more mainland Chinese move into Hong Kong, bringing different perspectives and potentially different expectations regarding governance and civil liberties, a question lingers: if Hong Kong becomes just another Chinese city, what is left of the promise encoded in “One Country, Two Systems”? What becomes of a place whose freedoms survive only in form, not in practice?
The neon lights still shine over Victoria Harbor. But beneath them, the silence, the departures, and the new arrivals all tell the story of a city whose very identity is being rewritten 28 years after its handover from the United Kingdom to China.