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“Hongcouver” is now “Mainland China-couver”

Vancouver is still a North American hub for Asian immigration — just not from Hong Kong. According to an April report by the Morning Post, Mainland Chinese arrivals in Vancouver “outstripped those from Hong Kong by 7,872 to 286 in 2012.” What’s more, while Hong Kongers trickled back over the Pacific in the late-1990s and 2000s, the number of Mainland Chinese in Vancouver jumped an incredible 88%.

The Hong Kongers killed Chinatown and left a Glass City

Vancouver’s nickname as the “Glass City” may never have come to pass without the Hong Kong handover. Hong Kong money and Hong Kong developers were a key factor behind the forest of glass condo developments that now dominate the city’s waterfront. At the same time, a rapid influx of wealthy Chinese “desegregated” the city, according to one study by the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia. Ethnic Chinese people are now strongly represented in almost every Metro Vancouver community.

They also heralded the “New Chinese”

Chinese people have been coming to British Columbia since the time of Captain George Vancouver himself, but they typically took their first steps on Canadian soil as poor fishermen or railroad workers. The Hong Kong Chinese, by contrast, arrived with money and influence. “The Hong Kong immigrants were really a new kind of Canadian … they expected to be first-class citizens, they wanted to live in the best neighbourhoods, wanted the best schools for their kids,” Henry Yu, a history professor at the University of British Columbia, told Postmedia News in 2007. Of course, the New Chinese also brought a tsunami of real estate investment that has also helped make Vancouver the world’s second-most unaffordable real estate market in the English-speaking world. The No. 1 spot? Hong Kong.