This study examines how state-facilitated digital ecosystem segregation—between China’s “walled garden” Internet and Hong Kong’s global digital sphere—shapes the integration trajectories of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong. Based on interviews with 25 students who relocated between 1998 and 2024, we show that immersion in state-aligned platforms such as WeChat cultivates a self-sufficient digital enclave anchored in homophilous networks. While offering robust support, this ecosystem diminishes interest in local community and neutralizes the imperative for assimilation by rendering the host society’s digital sphere functionally irrelevant. This reveals a process of digitally mediated structural non-assimilation, wherein geopolitical platform borders—enforced through digital sovereignty and infrastructural power—preempt cross-group interaction, reshape migrant belonging, and render engagement with the host society optional. Our analysis advances digital migration scholarship by revealing how politically segmented digital ecologies can preconfigure integration outcomes more fundamentally than individual connectivity choices, even within geographically and culturally proximate contexts.
Huang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.