31st October 2026 – (Hong Kong) Spend a day with a deal team in Admiralty and pay attention to which language is being spoken. The pitch book is in English and so are the legal documents. The call with the client in Shenzhen is in Mandarin, and so is the dinner with the issuer’s finance chief. The quick word with the operations staff downstairs is in Cantonese. For much of that day, a professional who speaks only English is left watching.
That context is missing from the complaint at the centre of Bloomberg’s report this week. José Manuel Rodríguez Moreno is a Mexican MBA graduate who has lived in Hong Kong since 2019. He says he sends 50 to 100 applications and hears back from almost no one, because so many openings now require Cantonese or Mandarin. His frustration is real, and a job seeker with a new baby deserves sympathy. However, some readers will take from his story that Hong Kong has turned unfair to foreigners, and that idea falls apart on a closer look.
Employers are hiring people who can do the work. Recruiter Sid Sibal told Bloomberg that firms which once did not insist on native Mandarin speakers now do. The reason is the client list. Mainland companies fill Hong Kong’s listings pipeline, and mainland firms use the city to raise capital and hold assets and intellectual property under international rules. A banker who cannot talk to the client will not win the mandate. A project manager who cannot read the supplier’s messages will not keep the project on schedule.
Nobody finds this strange anywhere else. Try building a career in Zurich or Geneva with no German or French, even at a company where meetings are held in English. Try rising far in Stockholm or Amsterdam without Swedish or Dutch, where nearly everyone speaks excellent English. You will find work, and you will also find a ceiling. Dubai is often held up as the place where English alone is enough, and up to a point it is. However, the expat who also speaks Arabic wins the government contracts and the family-office clients, and gets a seat where decisions are made. Language has always been part of what a professional is paid for.
Hong Kong has never hidden its own expectations. Under the Basic Law, Chinese and English are both official languages. For nearly three decades, the education system has aimed to make students “biliterate and trilingual”, able to write Chinese and English and speak Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Local graduates are trained to work in all three. When a well-paid post draws a trilingual applicant from Hong Kong or the mainland and a monolingual one from abroad, the outcome reflects competition. Expats used to praise the city for exactly that kind of competition.
For much of the colonial era and the years just after it, a foreigner could step into a senior role largely because he spoke English. That premium was never a right. It belonged to a city whose top tier of business answered to London and New York. The old “gateway to China” role began to fade in the early 2000s, as mainland cities opened up and global firms went straight to Shanghai and Beijing. Hong Kong became something more valuable instead. It is now the place where Chinese capital meets global rules, where mainland companies list under common law, and where international money moves freely in and out. That role needs people who can speak to both sides.
Some commentators insist that 2020 changed everything for business. The hiring figures suggest otherwise. More than 410,000 approvals were granted under the city’s talent schemes over three years, about three-quarters of them to mainland applicants, according to a government official in March. Thousands of foreign professionals are also returning, filling restaurants and pushing up rents in prime districts. What 2020 did was settle a question some firms had preferred to avoid. Hong Kong is part of China, and its economy faces China. Companies that understood this hired accordingly. Those that had not paid attention got a reminder.
The most telling detail in the report concerns Georges Elhedery, the Lebanon-born, French-educated chief executive of HSBC, who has been learning Mandarin. He runs one of the world’s largest banks and still sees the value of the language. Anyone can follow his example.
None of this means Hong Kong should become less welcoming. The government should keep visa schemes simple and its doors open. It should also do more for foreign residents who want to learn Chinese, through subsidised courses and partnerships with employers. Foreign talent brings networks, ideas and perspectives the city still needs, and English will remain a working language of finance and law here for a long time.
Open doors are a different thing from lower standards, though. Anyone who expects a high salary in a financial centre serving Chinese clients should expect to bring some Chinese to the job. Expats who accept that will find Hong Kong as rewarding as ever. Those waiting for the city to switch back to English alone may be waiting for a long time.
