Up to a million people fleeing Hong Kong can please China

Albert Ho crawls around the dining room of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club in a black jacket and scarf and sinks into his chair. The 69-year-old lawyer, democracy activist and opposition politician has just visited two friends in prison.

One is Jimmy Lai, the media mogul and pro-democracy activist whose Apple Daily The newspaper applauded the city’s protest movement before Beijing smothered the disturbances with a draconian national security law that accused it of “foreign collusion”. Lai went denied bail while awaiting trial. Another was politician Wu Chi-wai, a former leader of the main opposition party, the Democratic Party, and one of 55 activists and former lawmakers arrested in early January. John Clancey, an American lawyer at Ho’s firm, was also taken into custody that day, the first foreigner caught under the new comprehensive security law, whose vaguely defined crimes include subversion and secession. “I have so many friends who are now in prison,” says Ho over lunch. “I will probably be next.” He can be right: Ho has presided over the Democratic Party and his law firm has defended hundreds of protesters. Chinese state media dubbed him a member of a new “Gang of Four” responsible for the bustle of the city.

China’s relentless repression may have succeeded in crushing Hong Kong’s protests and neutralizing political opposition. But it is also doing something else: leading many here to think about fleeing abroad. Newly released figures from the Taiwanese National Immigration Agency show that more than 10,800 Hong Kong residents received residence permits in 2020, almost double the previous year’s total. Since the security law came into force, several nations – including Australia and Canada – have opened up new immigration routes for Hong Kong residents. And in the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on February 1 that the country should offer refuge to Hong Kong, “victims of the repression by Chinese authorities”.

The United Kingdom, the former colonial lord of the territory, extended the broadest welcome, inviting British National (Overseas) (BN (O)) passport holders to apply for a new type of visa that establishes a path to citizenship. About 5.2 million Hong Kong residents, or two-thirds of the population of 7.5 million, are eligible to accept the UK offer. A British government forecast foresees the departure of around 1 million in the next five years.

Over time, the exodus may reshape Hong Kong’s political and financial landscape, with a study predicting $ 36 billion in outflows this year alone. The flight will only accelerate the integration of the territory with mainland China, which has shown itself willing to pump people and money across the border, including by encouraging more Chinese companies to list in Hong Kong.

Of course, Hong Kong’s history was shaped by migrations – in and out – often triggered by political turmoil. The continent’s inhabitants fled here after Mao Zedong’s communists conquered China in 1949 and in the decades after young “freedom swimmers” faced the sea to escape the Cultural Revolution.

The wealthy left the city in times of uncertainty, including after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and before delivery in 1997, when the United Kingdom transferred sovereignty to China. They fled to London, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto and other cosmopolitan locations. Many returned as soon as they realized that the People’s Liberation Army tanks would not be rolling down Queen’s Road Central, which is why Hong Kong today houses more than 300,000 Canadian citizens with dual citizenship.

The best escape route currently leads to the UK. After China imposed the security law without local debate on June 30, the Boris Johnson government labeled the measure as a “clear and serious” violation of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which China has pledged not to change Hong Kong’s way of life for 50 years after the transfer. London retaliated with the new visa for holders of BN (O) passports – created before the city returned to Chinese rule in 1997 – which would allow them to remain in the UK and gain citizenship if they stayed at least 180 days a year for five years. .

At least 7,000 Hong Kong residents had already arrived in the UK before the visa application window opened on January 31. The only likely reason they have not followed more is the UK’s atrocious treatment of Covid-19, with daily cases of around 20,000. (Hong Kong’s total pandemic total is less than 11,000 infected.) With the UK now making rapid progress on vaccinations, the number of arrivals is bound to increase: a British government impact assessment suggests something between a 320,000 midpoint and more than 1 million Hong Kong citizens will accept your offer in five years.

For Tak, a newcomer to London who asked for his full name to be withheld out of concern for his family, there is no turning back now. Born and educated in Hong Kong, he worked at one of the city’s global banks and, during the protests, spent lunch breaks and weekends attending rallies and marches. He says that previous emigrants returned home after the transfer, when the city was thriving and China was not overtly threatening.

It’s different now, he says. The harsh way in which China’s leadership has dealt with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement shows that it does not mind jeopardizing the city’s status as one of the world’s financial centers. Concerned about the worsening political climate, his family opened accounts abroad and transferred his money. He hopes his parents will eventually join him in the UK

For Tak, the national security law was the “turning point”. His nightmare is that Beijing will one day subdue Hong Kong’s inhabitants as if it had Uighurs, members of an ethnic minority in western China who were forced to enter detention camps. “As soon as Hong Kong loses its importance as a financial center, the people of Hong Kong will have the same fate,” he says.