ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief review of immigration history in Hong Kong. It describes how the immigrant streams have been influenced by social changes in both sending and receiving regions. The chapter discusses the theoretical background of immigrants' economic adaptation and how gender has been a factor in shaping this process. It also provides a brief description of the data, the Hong Kong 2011 population census and the analytical approach. In the twentieth century, migration from mainland China to Hong Kong was largely dominated by social changes in China, such as war, political regime transition and economic reform. During the civil war in China in the late 1940s, Hong Kong's population jumped from around 500,000 to 2 million. According to the feminist theory on migration, gender, as fundamental to social relations and subjective identity, plays a very important role in constructing women's migration experiences.
