It is a humid and busy Friday afternoon as Aruna Gurung, one of Hong Kong’s District Councillors, stands outside the Kowloon Mosque handing out leaflets for a jobs fair that aims to encourage diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
While the pamphlet urges businesses to hire more widely from the city’s demographic pool, the message could equally be targeted at the council on which Gurung sits.
In January 2024, the Hong Kong government appointed 179 people to fill about half of the seats of the District Councils (DCs), which advise the government about, and manage services in, the city’s 18 municipal districts. Yet only two of the members, Gurung and Dr Rizwan Ullah, are from an ethnic minority. The picture is worse in the city’s Electoral College, which selects its leader, and in the Executive Council, which consults on government policy: not a single non-Chinese member sits on either body.
“It’s not enough,” says Gurung. “There needs to be more non-Chinese district councillors. We need more opportunities and a greater voice. I request the government to allow us to work together to build a better community.”
Historically, there has been a lack of non-Chinese representation in the government, according to Dr John Tse, the former executive director at Hong Kong Unison, a now-defunct non-profit organisation that was committed to achieving racial equality in the city.
Data from 2021 shows that 4% of the city’s population is ethnically non-Chinese; that rises to about 8% when foreign domestic workers, who are not counted as residents, are included. If the council were to reflect the city’s resident population, at least 4% of members should be of non-Chinese ethnicity, equating to seven members.
“Ethnic minorities are not a major focus for the government or the District Council,” Tse said before Unison was disbanded this year. “[We have had] hundreds of district councillors who are primarily ethnic Chinese. Ethnic minorities are underrepresented.”
Unison’s dissolution came amid recriminations as its former leaders said they were concerned it would be exploited for personal gain. Its disbandment can be seen as yet another reduction of dwindling resources for ethnic minorities in the city.
Low count
Government data available from 2016 to 2023 show that only one non-Chinese councillor has sat on any DC. Architect Paul Zimmerman was born in the Netherlands and moved to Hong Kong in 1984. He went on to represent the Pok Fu Lam constituency from 2010 until the end of 2023.
District councillor numbers have always been largely set by the government, or by industries in what are known as functional constituencies. The proportion of directly elected members has varied since district representation was established in 1982. They were drastically reduced for the 2023 council, however, to just 88 of the 470 seats.
But there is little indication that the situation would have been better if members were chosen under wider suffrage. In 1985, Indian-born businessman Gary Ahuja ran and lost in that year’s Tsim Sha Tsui DC elections. He subsequently bounced back, winning in 1988, 1991, 1994, and 1999, to earn a seat on the council. And Italian priest Giuseppe Salaroli served as an Eastern District Council member from 1983 to 2007.
“Multiculturalism is not an agenda item for Hong Kong. People would rather talk about Chinese culture than anything else,” according to Tse.
Community leaders
Ullah and Gurung were appointed as DC members in late 2023. Their journeys to the chamber could not have been more different.
Ullah, who is of Pakistani descent, pursued a master’s degree in education at the Hong Kong Baptist University and is currently a vice principal at Tai Po-based Law Ting Pong Secondary School. Gurung, meanwhile, worked for the now-defunct Cathay Dragon airline for 32 years as a flight attendant. She is the daughter of a Nepalese soldier who served in the British Army’s respected Ghurka regiment during the city’s colonial rule.
When Gurung married her Nepalese husband in 1997, he did not speak Cantonese. This prompted her to help him learn the basics of the language, which sparked a desire to aid other ethnic minorities in the city, particularly in her Nepalese community. Consequently, she worked on a series of booklets entitled Let’s Learn Simple Cantonese that were published by the Home Affairs Department in 2001.
“I distributed 5,000 copies to our community, and the government realised, ‘Oh, I can do something for the community’,” Gurung says.
Ullah’s community work, meanwhile, began in 2006 when he and a group of friends came together to start the Pakistani Students Association Hong Kong, a South Asian-community-wide initiative that aims to highlight unaddressed educational needs. Now a Kowloon City District Councillor, Ullah volunteered as a consultant and trainer for more than a decade, offering guidance to parents on their children’s higher education, among other responsibilities.
Ullah, also Hong Kong-born, says that his day as a councillor usually involves responding to an average of 30-40 emails, attending in-person meetings with the people that he serves and being on the phone answering constituents’ concerns.
“Representation matters but it will take some time,” he says. “Honestly, it’s a two-way street. The government needs to open up. At the same time, we also need passionate people from the ethnic minority community that are capable of serving.”
Fighting for ethnic minority rights
Ullah says that while it is important for ethnic minorities to be respected by their public servants, he strives to be a DC member for everyone in Hong Kong, regardless of their ethnicity.
“I’m not a Pakistani District Councillor; I serve all the communities, regardless of their skin colour or their social status,” he says. “I have many Chinese constituents that come to me and I help them solve their problems. I’m a very pragmatic and diplomatic person.”
Ullah believes in engaging and working with authorities about issues facing his constituents and discussing how best to improve their lives. Similarly, Gurung says that it is important for her to serve all ethnic minorities as well as her local Nepalese community.
She cites the time she was a guest at a grand opening ceremony and a Nepalese woman approached her to ask for help to prevent her child’s school being closed. The planned closure was set to affect about 90 ethnic-minority children who would have needed to find a new school at short notice. With the clock ticking and the new school year approaching, Gurung went to work to find a list of available schools from the Education Bureau that these children could attend.
“I was really worried,” she says. “It was challenging because I [had] just become a District Councillor in January and the incident happened around that time.”
Within two months, all of the children had gained admission into a new school.
Ullah and Gurung are cautiously optimistic about the future but acknowledge that there is still work to be done.
“I’d like to see more visibility [for ethnic minorities] in the government, as well as across different sectors. We need to change the mindset of the general population that we are more than capable of serving in the government,” says Ullah.
Gurung echoes that sentiment.
“We need to be able to send a message to the government,” she says. “As ethnic minorities, we need the best people to serve us. I’m hopeful that through communicating with the government, it’ll realise that we have so much more to give to Hong Kong.”
The Hong Konger reached out to the government for comment about the lack of ethnic minority representation.
