Abul owes his ability to adapt to university life in Guangzhou to 18 years of living in Hong Kong, which has a similar culture and is close to the mainland city geographically.

Three other non-Chinese students from Hong Kong have entered SMU in the past two years. All are pursuing bachelor's degrees. Previously, only one Pakistani student from Hong Kong had graduated from the university.

South China University of Technology, which is about 7 kilometers from SMU, enrolled its first two non-Chinese students from Hong Kong in 2017. Another was admitted for the current academic year.

In addition to universities in the Greater Bay Area, prestigious institutions in Beijing and Shanghai are also in demand among non-Chinese Hong Kong students intent on furthering their education on the mainland.

Jonathan Alduvi Rivera Padilla, 24, moved from Hong Kong to the Chinese capital in September 2016 as a freshman at Beijing Foreign Studies University's International Business School.

After leaving his home country, El Salvador in Central America, Rivera studied in Hong Kong for about six years.

A strong interest in learning Chinese, and curiosity about the capital, drew him to Beijing, which he first visited in 2016.

"Hong Kong is good, but it's small," Rivera said.

His new life in Beijing was not easy at first. He could not speak Mandarin, but language classes every semester got him over this hurdle. "I appreciate my Chinese teachers' patience in the past two years in helping me out of this difficulty," Rivera said.

"I have had fun exploring Beijing, learning how diverse cultures and dialects from different provinces mix in the city," he said. "This is what I would never have learned if I'd just stayed in Hong Kong."

Non-Chinese students from Hong Kong are admitted by mainland universities as foreign nationals, although they may have been born in the city or arrived in it at an early age.

Official statistics on non-Chinese students from Hong Kong studying on the mainland are not available. But Yuen Kwok-ming, principal of Caritas Tuen Mun Marden Foundation Secondary School, which is in the city's New Territories area, has seen a small but growing number of his students leaving to pursue higher education on the mainland.

The school has about 500 students, 70 percent of whom cannot speak Cantonese. Since 2015, when the school sent its first non-Chinese graduate to the mainland for further studies, it has helped about 10 more non-Chinese young people to enter mainland universities. Seven of them went to Guangzhou.