page_title: Hong Kong
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Hong Kong / Demographics
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: A population pyramid illustrates the age and sex structure of a country's population and may provide insights about political and social stability, as well as economic development. The population is distributed along the horizontal axis, with males shown on the left and females on the right. The male and female populations are broken down into 5-year age groups represented as horizontal bars along the vertical axis, with the youngest age groups at the bottom and the oldest at the top. The shape of the population pyramid gradually evolves over time based on fertility, mortality, and international migration trends.
context_page_description: Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, is a metropolitan area and special administrative region of the People's Republic of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta of the South China Sea. With over 7.5 million people of various nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
  Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The whole territory was transferred to China in 1997. As a special administrative region, Hong Kong maintains separate governing and economic systems from that of mainland China under a principle of "one country, two systems".
  Originally a sparsely populated area of farming and fishing villages, the territory has become one of the world's most significant financial centres and commercial ports. It is the world's tenth-largest exporter and ninth-largest importer.
context_section_description: The Census and Statistics Department estimated Hong Kong's population at 7,482,500 in mid-2019. The overwhelming majority (92 per cent) is Han Chinese, most of whom are Taishanese, Teochew, Hakka, and a number of other Cantonese peoples. The remaining eight per cent are non-ethnic Chinese minorities, primarily Filipinos, Indonesians, and South Asians. About half the population have some form of British nationality, a legacy of colonial rule; 3.4 million residents have British National (Overseas) status, and 260,000 British citizens live in the territory. The vast majority also hold Chinese nationality, automatically granted to all ethnic Chinese residents at the transfer of sovereignty. Headline population density of about 6,800 people/km² does not reflect true densities since only 6.9% of land is residential, the residential average population density calculates closer to a highly cramped 100,000/km².
  The predominant language is Cantonese, a variety of Chinese originating in Guangdong. It is spoken by 94.6 per cent of the population, 88.9 per cent as a first language and 5.7 per cent as a second language. Slightly over half the population (53.2 per cent) speaks English, the other official language; 4.3 per cent are native speakers, and 48.9 per cent speak English as a second language. Code-switching, mixing English and Cantonese in informal conversation, is common among the bilingual population. Post-handover governments have promoted Mandarin, which is currently about as prevalent as English; 48.6 per cent of the population speaks Mandarin, with 1.9 per cent native speakers and 46.7 per cent speaking it as a second language. Traditional Chinese characters are used in writing, rather than the simplified characters used on the mainland.
  Among the religious population, the traditional "three teachings" of China, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, have the most adherents (20 per cent), and are followed by Christianity (12 per cent) and Islam (4 per cent). Followers of other religions, including Sikhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and the Bahá'í Faith, generally originate from regions where their religion predominates.
  Life expectancy in Hong Kong was 82.2 years for males and 87.6 years for females in 2018, the sixth-highest in the world. Cancer, pneumonia, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and accidents are the territory's five leading causes of death. The universal public healthcare system is funded by general-tax revenue, and treatment is highly subsidised; on average, 95 per cent of healthcare costs are covered by the government.
  Income inequality has risen since the transfer of sovereignty, as the region's ageing population has gradually added to the number of nonworking people. Although median household income steadily increased during the decade to 2016, the wage gap remained high; the 90th percentile of earners receive 41 per cent of all income. The city has the most billionaires per capita, with one billionaire per 109,657 people. Despite government efforts to reduce the growing disparity, median income for the top 10 per cent of earners is 44 times that of the bottom 10 per cent.
caption: 2016 population pyramid
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