The Australian Bureau of Statistics will classify all "Hongkonger" ancestry responses as "Chinese" in next Tuesday's census, denying recognition to a community that insists its cultural identity is fundamentally distinct from mainland China.
The decision affects thousands of Hong Kong-born Australians and their descendants who've fled recent political turmoil. Kevin Yam, a former lawyer and pro-democracy activist now holding Australian citizenship, will fill out his first census on Tuesday night. He plans to write "Hongkonger" as his ancestry. It won't count. "If you can say that you're born in Hong Kong and you can say that you speak Cantonese at home, then why can't you say that Hongkonger is your ancestry?" Yam said. "It just makes no sense."
The Classification Problem
The ABS uses the Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups to code ethnic groups. "Hong Kong ancestry is not a separate ancestry category in ASCCEG and will continue to be coded to Chinese," the ABS told the ABC. The bureau pointed to other questions measuring cultural diversity, including country of birth, birth country of parents and language used at home.
But Hongkongers born in Australia, China or elsewhere with strong Hong Kong roots have no way to identify as such. Jane Poon, president of the Australia-Hong Kong Link community group, advocated for the change with the ABS five years ago. "I'm the third generation born from Hong Kong," Poon said. "We treasure our own identities and also hope that others, [whether] it's the Australian government or other people, recognise and acknowledge our own identity — not just imposing [a Chinese] identity over us."
The ASCCEG includes hundreds of possible ancestries, from Catalan and Basque to Uyghur, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Mongolian and Tibetan. The classification isn't static. Since the last census, two new groups were added: Israeli and Edo. Some were relabelled, including Uyghur instead of Uighur. Other categories — Darfur, Madurese, Temoq, Hutu and Kunama — were retired and shifted under broader groups.
Political Tensions
Hong Kong was handed back to the People's Republic of China 29 years ago with the promise that it could maintain its own capitalist and political system for 50 years. Ted Hui, a former Hong Kong politician granted asylum in Australia last year, said Hong Kong had long been culturally distinct from China. The impetus for Hongkongers to assert that unique identity came to a head seven years ago, when mass protests erupted on the streets of Hong Kong in response to perceived encroachment of democratic freedoms by the Chinese Communist Party.
The territory is part of China under the "one country, two systems" framework, but Hongkongers point to more than 150 years of British rule that created vastly different education and political systems. A key distinction is language — Hongkongers write in traditional rather than simplified Chinese, and they speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin.
Both Yam and Hui are wanted in Hong Kong under the extra-territorial National Security Law. Hui said a new law introduced in China two months ago — the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion law — has put renewed vigour into China's diverse ethnic groups to maintain their cultures and sparked concerns among those in Australia deemed to be "undermining ethnic unity." Human rights groups say the new law attempts to erase the country's ethnic minorities.
"The more oppressed we are, the more we feel the need to maintain that [identity] so that it doesn't disappear," Hui said. "Otherwise, the unique culture that we have will just vanish." He called it "inappropriate and unfair" for the ABS to shift Hongkonger responses under the Chinese ancestry category. "I don't think that's on purpose, but that may be inadvertently fitting into the Chinese political propaganda," he said.
Broader Community Concerns
Ramila Chanisheff said the recent law was also a concern for her Uyghur community, a Turkic Muslim population from Xinjiang. She urged Uyghur respondents to identify themselves as such, rather than Chinese. "The Australian census needs to pick up how many Uyghurs live in Australia and how we can be protected, especially with the ethnic unity law that's coming into effect," she said.
Members of the Tibetan and Taiwanese communities encouraged their members to list those specific categories. Tenzin Khangsar from the Australia Tibet Council said: "Recognising our community in Census data helps ensure that our presence is visible and can contribute to better understanding of our community's needs, which may help inform future policies and services."
The census will be held on Tuesday, August 11. Respondents can now list four ancestries compared with two in previous years. The census is compulsory, and failure to complete it can attract a $364 per day fine. The census is only available in English, but information about the census is available in 26 languages, and people can call the Translating and Interpreting Service on 131 450.
One section that raised eyebrows was the country of birth question. There's a list of seven countries to choose from, based on the most common answers in the last census. China doesn't appear on the list, despite being the third-most common country of birth according to the 2021 census. "China is an exception and is not included as a tick-box response," an ABS spokesperson said, adding this has been the case since 1991. "This is to encourage more specific answers for this question, such as China, Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan, which are collected and reported separately in Census data."
Why This Matters:
The ABS's refusal to recognize Hongkonger as a distinct ancestry category raises fundamental questions about government's role in defining cultural identity. When a bureaucracy collapses distinct communities into broader categories that those communities explicitly reject, it's not just a data-gathering quirk — it's an erasure of lived experience. The classification system already recognizes hundreds of specific ancestries, including Catalan, Basque, and even newly-added Israeli and Edo. The absence of Hongkonger appears arbitrary, especially given that the bureau separately tracks Hong Kong as a country of birth. For communities fleeing authoritarian pressure to subsume their identities, Australia's census inadvertently mirrors the very political forces they escaped. The data matters for policy, resource allocation, and understanding Australia's actual composition. Getting it wrong doesn't just produce bad statistics. It produces invisible communities.