Though Hong Kong is home to a number of people of different racial and ethnic origins, the overwhelming majority of Hongkongers are of Han Chinese descent.

The territory is also home to other Han subgroups including the Taishan Yue, Hakka, Hoklo, Teochew, Shanghainese, Sichuanese and Shandong people.

Meanwhile, non-Han Chinese Hongkongers such as the British, Filipinos, Indonesians, Thais, South Asians and Vietnamese make up six percent of Hong Kong's population.

[25][26] The Companies House of the UK government similarly added Hong Konger to its standard list of nationalities in September 2020.

For example, residents of China may settle in Hong Kong for family reunification purposes if they obtain a one-way permit (for which there may be a waiting time of several years).

[28] Historically, much of the Han Chinese trace their ancestral origins from Southern China as Chaoshan, Canton, Taishan, Fujian, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang.

Thus, immigrants from Guangdong and their descendants have long constituted the majority of the ethnic Chinese residents of Hong Kong, which accounts for the city's broad Cantonese culture.

[31] For that reason, while there are groups with ancestral roots in more distant parts of China, such as Shanghai and Shandong, as well as members of other Han Chinese subgroups, such as the Hakka, Hokkien, and Teochew,[32][33][34][35] residents who are Hong Kong-born and/or raised often assimilate into the mainstream Cantonese identity of Hong Kong and typically adopt Cantonese as their first language.

As a result, after the 1997 transfer of sovereignty to the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong has continued to develop a unique identity under the rubric of One Country Two Systems.

A new emigration wave occurred following the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests and the United Kingdom's enactment of the BN(O) visa scheme.