A survey of how Hongkongers view ethnic minorities has revealed that the darker your skin, the less favourably you are perceived.
Carried out between 2007 and 2012 by a non-governmental organisation that helps ethnic minorities, the survey found that respondents, of whom more than 99 per cent were ethnic Chinese, had negative views of people from Southeast Asia and Africa. Some associated them with words like 'violent,' 'dirty' and 'Chungking Mansions', referring to the notorious building in Tsim Sha Shui.
'Some of the words the participants used to describe ethnic minorities are quite terrible,' said Fermi Wong Wai-fun, executive director of Hong Kong Unison, the organisation behind the poll.
The findings are an embarrassment for Hong Kong, which calls itself 'Asia's world city', she added.
Just over 6 per cent of Hong Kong's population is non-ethnic Chinese, according to the 2011 Census, with the most represented minorities being Indonesian and Filipino. Gone are the days when people would leave their seat on the MTR if an African got on, but many instances show attitudes have been slow to evolve.
'Hong Kong is not assimilating foreigners the way it should, even when they were born here,' said Louis Ajonuma, a Nigerian businessman at a press conference organised yesterday by Hong Kong Unison.
More than half of the 1,862 respondents were police officers-in-training at the Hong Kong Police College, 10 per cent were secondary school teachers and the remainder secondary school pupils and university students.
