Hong Kong will give further financial support to ethnic minorities in their education and services, Hong Kong's top financial official pledged on Wednesday.

"Though a predominantly Chinese society, Hong Kong has quite a number of ethnic minorities who are valued members of our community," said John Tsang, financial secretary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, when delivering the annual budget speech to the Legislative Council.

Some members of ethnic minorities, however, are disadvantaged because of their education level, language barriers, lack of social networks, and other causes, he said.

He proposed to grant a recurrent annual allowance of 300,000 HK dollars (US$38,555), starting from the 2008-2009 school year, to 19 designated primary and secondary schools to help them implement the School-based Support Scheme for non-Chinese speaking students, and to suitably increase the allowance granted to such "designated schools" with a higher intake of non-Chinese speaking students.

"We will also seek to increase the number of these schools to 25 within two school years. It is estimated that full implementation of these proposals will entail an additional provision of 13 million HK dollars a year," he said.

Tsang also proposed to set up, on a trial basis, four support service centers in different districts to provide interpretation services for ethnic minorities using health care services, job centers and social welfare facilities.

Chinese and English language courses and other activities will also be organized to help them integrate into the community, he said.

"I will earmark 16 million HK dollars as the operating expenses of these centers for the coming year and allocate an additional 8 million HK dollars to subsidize their start-up cost," said Tsang.

(Xinhua News Agency February 28, 2008)