Hong Kong, March 2018 - Domestic service and crowded housing

I’ve worked out that this has been my sixth visit to Hong Kong.  My first was in 2005.  All but one of my visits has been primarily for work purposes, although each of them has had some free time on the side, enabling me to get out and about and not just sit in meetings and functions, or visit institutions.  Over the years I have been all over the Special Administrative Region (SAR), including parts of the New Territories, but in reality the areas I know best are certain districts in Kowloon along with almost the whole of Hong Kong Island itself and some of the outlying islands such as Lamma.

Yesterday was Sunday, and at 9 o’clock in the evening I walked back to the Airport Express station from the Macau Ferry port on Hong Kong Island.  An overhead walkway provides most of the route and continuously lined along this were little enclosures made of cardboard boxes half opened out so that each enclosure can accommodate between 4 and 8 women sitting on the ground.  In most the remains of picnics were being finished off.  Earlier I passed a bus station where two much larger groups had taken up root directly on the pavement between the bus stands, and in one of the group two or three men were making music and singing to a guitar, but the majority of those present were women.  Elsewhere a glance into darkened corners between the high rise buildings or under walkways provided a vision of three of four women lying on the floor surrounded by the detritus of a meal.  Earlier on in the day I was walking the promenade at Tsim Sha Tsui, along with thousands of others, looking across the waters of the Victoria Harbour at the towering office and apartment blocks of Hong Kong Island all the way from Kennedy Town in the west to North Point in the East, and notable among the crowds were large numbers of women wearing Islamic headscarves.  Last Sunday I was on a bus and passed Victoria Park at Causeway Bay, and all along the pavement next to the park sat groups of women.

I guess that, along with various of the Gulf States, Hong Kong is the territory with the greatest prevalence of domestic service anywhere in the world, and almost all of it is labour drawn in from abroad.  Data from the Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong SAR shows that at the end of 2016 there were 352,513 registered domestic service workers in the SAR of whom 98.5 per cent were female: 53 per cent of these were from the Philippines and 44 per cent from Indonesia.  As there are around 2.5 million households in Hong Kong that means that roughly every seventh household employs a domestic servant. (It may, of course, be that some of the wealthiest households employ several, thereby reducing the percentage of households with a servant).   Put another way, foreign domestic servants make up around 4.8 per cent of the total population of Hong Kong.

Many years ago I did some research on the domestic servants of Paris, concentrating on Spanish and Portuguese women. In the 1982 census of Paris, Iberian females amounted to 6 per cent of the population of the wealthy district along the Champs-Elysées, and 5 per cent in some nearby districts.  But an observation I made then (White, 1989: in P.E. Ogden and P.E. White, Migrants in Modern France, p. 206) was that “one of the most interesting aspects of the presence of Iberians in these wealthy areas of Paris is their lack of visibility.” The same would be true of Filipina and Indonesian domestic servants in Hong Kong now.  Except on Sunday.  For Sunday is the normal day for domestic servants to be given the 24 hour period free of duties, as mandated in the employment regulations.  It is a requirement for all domestic servants to live in the households of their employers – a requirement that has recently been upheld in a legal judgement made shortly before my visit. 

So it is that on Sundays, ‘released’ from their other duties, the maids of Hong Kong meet up with others of similar backgrounds and occupations to spend their day together – picnicking on the street or under the cover of overhead walkways or bus stations.    These latter are obvious places to meet up since they can gather women from several districts (many Hong Kong buses cross between the mainland and Hong Kong Island via the three road tunnels). The domestic workers of Hong Kong suddenly become very visible for one day a week.

Hong Kong has some of the smallest average apartment sizes for a developed world city – on average around 470 square feet (44 square metres), going down to 130 square feet (12 square metres) in some of the most crowded areas – particularly on Hong Kong Island.  Given the regulatory requirement for domestic workers to be provided with accommodation allowing ‘reasonable privacy’, the most crowded areas of Hong Kong do not have large numbers of servants.   So the Filipinas and Indonesians have a Sunday ‘commuter journey’ to meet up in certain central spaces.

To say that there is overcrowding in Hong Kong is an understatement.  I have been privileged in the last few days to be working alongside a number of very informative local residents, and I also benefited from a long conversation with a senior flight attendant on my way back to the UK last night. Everyone recognises that the price of property is well-nigh unaffordable for any vestige of comfortable living by ordinary people, particularly on Hong Kong Island.  There are certainly many poorer people there, but they have lived in their flats for decades.  Newer or more spacious property is dominated by business people and above all expats.   All the people I was working with live in Kowloon, near Tsing Yi (on the way out to the airport) or in the New Territories.  None could afford to live in Central or Wan Chai (or perhaps would want to, given the crowded nature of these districts). 

But will the booming nature of the Hong Kong economy and housing market last?  The number of maids has risen by 40 per cent in the last eight years.  But, as a mainland Chinese colleague pointed out to me over the weekend, Hong Kong suffered more than the People’s Republic during the financial crisis of the late ‘noughties’.  And the relationship between Hong Kongers and China is fraught with anxiety.  The ‘Occupy Central’ protests of late 2014 (which I witnessed at first hand since I was in Hong Kong at the time) led to a toughening of Beijing’s stand on the future autonomy of the SAR.  University students in Hong Kong, most recently in the Baptist University, continue to object to compulsory courses in Putonghua (standard Chinese). One of my Hong Kong colleagues told me she’d not been to China since she was taken there on a school trip as a child, and she has no desire to go back.  Macau is being built up by the Chinese authorities as an education centre to vie with Hong Kong.  And the growth of Shanghai as a global city (recorded in my previous blog) could threaten Hong Kong.  

The flight attendant this morning on my flight back to Manchester was telling me that she’s looking to invest in property to rent out in Salford, or in Blackley in North Manchester – less risky than in Hong Kong, even in the New Territories where she currently lives.   But there will be little question of the employment of foreign domestic labour in such Manchester locations – particularly after Brexit.