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Localist parties have become an emerging force in Hong Kong's political landscape. What has caused the rise of localism in the city? Extant studies focus on cultural and social factors. In this article, we propose a political economy explanation: global and regional economic factors have caused a housing boom in Hong Kong since the mid-2000s and produced impactful redistributive consequences. While homeowners benefit tremendously from the hike in asset prices, non-homeowners stand to lose. Their divergent economic interests then translate into political preferences; homeowners support political parties that favour the status quo, while non-homeowners tend to support those that challenge it. Using a newly available public opinion survey, we find preliminary evidence in support of our argument. In particular, homeowners are less likely to identify with localist parties and tend to vote for pro-establishment ones. High-income earners, however, are more likely to vote for localist parties.

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Despite a notoriously high level of income inequality, public discussion about the issue in Hong Kong has been largely limited to overall trends. This is partially due to a lack of fine-grained data, especially on socially relevant inequality dimensions. This study introduces the group-based inequality data set, which provides indices on inequality within and between groups based on census surveys from 1991 to 2016. Compared with past immigrants, some recent immigrants are highly educated and/or of high socioeconomic status, which has exacerbated inequality within the immigrant groups. This study further examines whether this change in immigrant profile has contributed to the surge in property prices and finds that immigrants also suffer from increasingly unaffordable housing. Overall, the article highlights a seldom-discussed dimension of inequality with reference to social groups that is expected to be a potent source of socioeconomic tension in the future.