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Why Hong Kongers Are Moving to this Town in Central Taiwan

Why Hong Kongers Are Moving to this Town in Central Taiwan

Source:Chien-Ying Chiu

Over the past two years, many people from Hong Kong have sought to escape the Chinese crackdown on freedoms at home. Taiwan has been a popular destination, but their top place to settle has not been big cities such as Taipei or Kaohsiung but a small coastal town in Taichung. Here’s why.

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Why Hong Kongers Are Moving to this Town in Central Taiwan

By Linden Chen
web only

The largely uninhabited Taichung Port urban redevelopment zone faces sea gusts strong enough to knock people off their feet, but it still has emerged as a hotspot for many Hong Kong residents immigrating to Taiwan.  

In 2019, 1,392 people, or 12.6 percent of all the people from Hong Kong and Macau who moved to Taiwan, registered their residences in Taichung. That number was up 22.3 percent from 2018 and the highest of any city or county in Taiwan, according to Ministry of the Interior (MOI) statistics.

Kala See (史佩欣), the general manager of Uni Immigration Consultancy Ltd.’s operations in Taiwan who has helped more than 300 Hong Kongers immigrate to Taiwan, said the number of people from Hong Kong and Macau establishing residences in Taichung continued to grow in 2020. 

There are no definitive official statistics on exactly how many recent immigrants from Hong Kong live in Qingshui (清水), but when a CommonWealth reporter talked to local residents, nearly every one of them said they knew several Hong Kongers living in their town.

Similarly, the owner of a food truck named Angie, who operates in the area, said that, “whenever we go out and set up somewhere, we invariably get customers who came from Hong Kong.” 

What Makes Qingshui Attractive? 

MOI statistics indicate that roughly 2,600 people from Hong Kong and Macau live in Taichung, but one veteran real estate broker estimates that after the pro-democracy movement erupted in Hong Kong in mid-2019, the number of people buying houses in Qingshui rose by at least 30 percent and that 500-600 Hong Kongers currently live there.

Jessica Hsu, manager of the Real Estate R&D Department at H&B Realty Franchise System’s head office, said Qingshui and the area that fans out to Wuqi and Shalu have the benefit of being close to the international airport and housing prices that are less than half what they would be in the Taoyuan and Linkou areas near Taoyuan International Airport in the north. 

That’s why for many “migratory couples” who now live in Taiwan but still make frequent trips back to Hong Kong and go to Taipei fairly often, the Qingshui area is their top choice, Hsu said.

Yet Qingshui is a small, unassuming town on the western coast of central Taiwan. That it was noticed at all in the first place was because of a Hong Kong couple that moved there three years ago. 

The Influence of a Hong Kong Couple

The couple of Mac Chau (鄒永健)  and Joanne Cheung (張平) , both about 40, are the publishers of the Facebook community “The Taiwan Road of Hong Kong Immigrants” (香港人移民台灣路) that has 23,000 followers. It is among the three biggest Facebook communities launched by Hong Kongers providing information on Taiwan to Hong Kong immigrants. 

The couple previously ran a one-stop shop camping supplies company operating in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But they changed their focus after the pro-democracy movement erupted in the former British territory, setting up a consulting company called Sunflower Immigration Consultancy to help the rising number of Hong Kongers inquiring about emigrating to Taiwan. 

Chau and Cheung’s own journey got its start at the end of 2014 following the failed Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong that sought universal suffrage, which led them to believe that Hong Kong was no longer open to the free expression of ideas. 

“It has become impossible for the school teachers with a sense of mission to even teach the next generation the truth or the difference between right and wrong,” Chau said with a tone of resentment.

Following a rather long process, the family finally arrived in Taiwan to settle here in April 2017 and rented a place near Qingshui Elementary School to make it easy for their children to go to school.

After searching for year, they bought a house in the community (at a price that was officially registered at NT$120,000 per ping, or 3.305 square meters), in part out of consideration for Chau’s need to frequently travel back and forth between Taiwan and Hong Kong to handle business interests in both places. 

“We decided on Qingshui because it is located conveniently close to the airport and living here you don’t hear the rumble of planes taking off and landing,” he said.

Cheung, who worked in Hong Kong as a senior executive in the IT industry, started her own blog after arriving in Taiwan to share her experience in immigrating to Taiwan and details of her life in her new home. She also carefully studied Taiwanese law related to immigration and passed an immigration law exam in 2018 that qualified her to open an immigration consulting company.

In the second half of 2019, pro-democracy demonstrations triggered by opposition to a controversial extradition law overtook Hong Kong. On June 16, 2019, an estimated 2 million Hong Kongers took to the streets, and on the same day 570 Hong Kongers applied to join the couple’s online community, giving the couple the determination to open their own company and help people from Hong Kong resettle in Taiwan.

An advisor to the Taichung City government observed that the content shared by Chau and Cheung online has successfully attracted a group of people with similar backgrounds to theirs: middle-class families who do not want to spend too much money to buy property and need to shuttle between Taiwan and Hong Kong once the pandemic ends. 

“Right now, almost all of the Hong Kong immigrants with these characteristics in Qingshui came after seeing the couple’s fan page,” the government advisor said.

A 36-year-old Hong Kong photographer named Ben is one of them. He bought a 150-square-meter house in the Taichung Port area in 2019 and immigrated to Taiwan in October 2020.

He sees his house, which is only a 10-minute drive from the airport, as a base of operations from where he can regularly return to Hong Kong to see his parents and travel around the world for photography assignments.

As a growing number of people from Hong Kong move to the Qingshui area, some in the coastal town are worried that housing prices there, which have already doubled over the past eight years, could be pushed even higher. 

H&B’s Hsu is skeptical, however. She noted that 7,474 Hong Kongers resided in Taiwan from January to October and 1,272 settled in the country. Those numbers pale when compared to the roughly 300,000 residential units that changed hands in Taiwan each year. “They could barely affect Taiwan’s housing market,” Hsu said. 

In fact, the sharp rise in housing prices in Qingshui has had little to do with the influx of Hong Kongers, Hsu said. Instead, the main driving forces have been the opening of the Mitsui Outlet Park in the Taichung Port area and the designation of Taichung International Airport as one of the endpoints of Taichung’s MRT Orange Line, which is still in the planning stages. 

In addition, the mentality of Hong Kongers immigrating to Taiwan have changed following the passage of a draconian National Security Act. Where once some of them might have seen Taiwan as a place to speculate in the property market, they now see it as a haven where they can settle and enjoy freedom.

Immigration expert See noted that Hong Kongers who come to live in Taiwan in the past generally held wait-and-see attitudes and returned to Hong Kong after getting their Taiwan ID. 

Today, however, they are moving to Taiwan and fully invested in making Taiwan their home, and for many of them, home will likely be a once sleepy village on Taiwan’s western coast.


Have you read?
♦ Despite Verbal Support for Hong Kong, Why is Immigrating to Taiwan So Hard?
♦ As Taiwan’s GDP Per Capita Caps US$30,000, Grimmer Days Lie Ahead
Taiwan Strait: Time for a ‘Cold Peace’ or a ‘Hot War’? 

Translated by Luke Sabatier
Uploaded by Penny Chiang

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