Ethnic minorities face uphill education fight in Hong Kong

For the 15,000 pupils in Hong Kong's public schools who don't speak Chinese, not knowing the local language doesn't just hold back their education.

Forced into one of a handful of schools with scarce resources and no classes offering Chinese as a second language, advocates say not enough is being done to help ethnic minority pupils integrate and break a cycle of poverty.

And, campaigners say, the problems in the education system reflect a wider social issue: the question of whether the government considers the city's ethnic-minority residents to be true Hongkongers.

"The government's major problem is it still views Hong Kong's non-Chinese population as transient, and that they have another place to call home," says Puja Kapai, a fourth-generation Hongkonger whose family came from India. "It's nonsensical to tell us to go back home ... and this [mentality] feeds government policies today.

"It's disconcerting."

Kapai began her education at a school designated for ethnic minority pupils before her parents scrimped and saved to put her through international and English Schools Foundation schools. She went on to graduate from the University of Hong Kong with a law degree before earning a master's on a scholarship at Harvard. She is now back at HKU as an associate professor of law.

But her growing frustration with a number of government policies - most notably the education system and the failure to offer classes in Chinese as a second language - leads her to believe that ethnic minority people are not considered part of the city's long-term future.