Why disruption, not the national security law, is the main force pushing Hongkongers to leave

Most international media will blame the surge in emigration inquiries on the national security law, but while that is natural it is also myopic
People will leave not because of communism or a lack of unfettered democracy, but over never-ending disruption to lives, careers and their children’s future

David Dodwell

Published: 9:30am, 6 Jul 2020

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Last October, the annual Chinese University survey of attitudes towards migration reported a shocking 42.3 per cent of Hong Kong respondents wanted to emigrate – mostly to Canada, Australia or Taiwan. That was up from around 33 per cent the year before. Run this survey today, and who would dare guess what the number would be.

Add the news that the British government, after decades of procrastination and provoked by Beijing’s decision to impose a national security law on Hong Kong, is preparing to offer full British passports to holders of the British National (Overseas) passport, and the potential is high for emigration inquiries to leap off the charts. More than 300,000 Hong Kong people hold BN(O) passports, and about 2.5 million more are thought to be eligible.

Most international media will opt to blame the surge in emigration inquiries on the national security bill. That might be natural, but it would be myopic.

Remember that when Chinese University researchers asked why respondents wanted to emigrate, the largest number (28 per cent) complained not about communism or even the absence of democracy, but that there was “too much political dispute or social cleavage.”

What we are watching in Hong Kong today is not a sudden surge in despair. Rather, it is the cruel, attritional impact of decades of political and economic uncertainty, combined with entrenched and seemingly unresolvable divisions between people pleased to be rejoined with the mainland and those who still hanker for the benign neglect of former colonial rule.

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I am not just talking about attrition during the past 23 years. Back to the early 1950s flight through Hong Kong of Kuomintang supporters in the wake of Mao Zedong’s communist victory, there has never been a time when the possible need to flee has not been in the minds of many in Hong Kong.

One of my biggest bugbears is that Hong Kong’s population planners spend all their time looking at birth and death rates when, during the past century, the only meaningful force for population change has been migration.

Since the 1950s, there have been numerous significant exoduses and influxes. For example, they followed the 1967 riots linked with the Cultural Revolution – my earliest memories of Hong Kong are of joining dawn patrols of the banks of the Shenzhen River with the British military as they picked up the bodies of young men drowned overnight trying to swim to Hong Kong; after Britain’s 1984 Joint Declaration agreement with Beijing to return Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty; after the 1989 Tiananmen tragedy, and; right up to 1997.

At its peak in 1992, around 66,000 people emigrated from Hong Kong, most of them to Canada. Since the Hong Kong government does not track emigrant flows, our only measure is the flow of applications for a Certificate of No Criminal Conviction – a document normally required before a destination country issues a resident visa.

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For all of these mass exits, there has been a similarly massive return flow in recent decades as many emigrants discover that the grass isn’t as green as they expected on the other side of the fence. There is even a slang Chinese phrase for this – xianggang huiliu chao, or “the Hong Kong return tide”.

So what are the odds that we face a new mass exodus, given fears and frustrations in Hong Kong after a crippling year of street protests, deep disappointment with the manifest incompetence of the Hong Kong administration and the terrible economic impact of the global pandemic? It is too early to tell.

Mainland officials are likely to move into overdrive to calm anxieties and try to demonstrate how the new law will be applied sensitively, with respect for the local rule of law and without lumbering over Hong Kong’s fiercely guarded high level of autonomy.

The mood is so grim and scepticism so high, though, that many will be sorely tempted. After no rise in real household incomes for most Hong Kong families since 1997, and with no hope of ever earning enough to buy a family home, many may decide they have little to lose. Only time will tell whether they drift back after tasting the post-pandemic austerities kicking in overseas.

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The first evidence will probably not come from emigration queues outside the British consulate but from Canada. Of the hundreds of thousands that emigrated mainly to Vancouver and Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s, a significant proportion eventually returned to Hong Kong after struggling with a protracted Canadian recession.

Most of the 300,000 Canadians now in Hong Kong are these returnees. For them, a flight back to Canada would be easy if push came to shove.

There is also early evidence of a surge of emigration. There were reportedly 50,000 applications for a Certificate of No Criminal Conviction in the two final quarters of 2019, and there were 20,000 applications in December alone.

Would a sudden rush for the exits amount to a truly existential challenge? Probably not. While migration has been a constant for Hong Kong for more than 70 years, the flow has been inward as much as out. Since the 150-a-day family reunion scheme began in the 1980s, more than 1 million people have arrived in Hong Kong from the mainland.

As their families have grown up, they have closer links with relatives in Guangdong than with Hong Kong settlers in Canada or Australia.

At the same time, the thousands of mainland companies that increasingly dominate Hong Kong’s stock market and corporate life are introducing thousands of mainland middle managers, many of whom are likely to continue their careers back on the mainland or overseas after a few years in Hong Kong getting their first taste of global business.

My sense is that people will leave less because they hate communism or the lack of unfettered democracy, but because of never-ending disruption to lives, careers and their children’s future. Hong Kong people would like to join the rest of the world with a normal uncertain future – a luxury that has eluded the city for too many decades.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

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