Up to a million people fleeing Hong Kong might just fit China

Albert Ho shuffles across the dining room of Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club in a suit and black scarf and bag in his seat. The 69-year-old lawyer, Democracy campaigner and opposition politician has just visited two friends in jail.

One of them is Jimmy Lai, the media mogul and pro-democracy activist whose Apple Daily newspaper applauded the city’s protest movement before Beijing suppressed the unrest with a draconian national security law it used to charge it with ‘foreign conspiracy’. Lai was denied bail pending trial. Another was politician Wu Chi-wai, the former leader of the city’s largest opposition Democratic Party and one of 55 activists and former lawmakers arrested in early January. John Clancey, an American lawyer at Ho’s, was also the day he was arrested, the first foreigner was strangled by the comprehensive new security law, whose vaguely defined crimes included undermining and secession. “I have so many friends who are in jail right now,” Ho said during lunch. “I’ll probably be next.” He could very well be right: Ho was once chairman of the Democratic Party, and his law firm defended hundreds of protesters. Chinese state media made him a member of a new “Gang of Four” responsible for the city’s unrest.

China’s relentless repression has succeeded in crushing Hong Kong’s protests and neutralizing political opposition. But it also does something else: many here are asked to flee abroad. Newly released figures from the Taiwanese National Immigration Agency show that more than 10,800 Hong Kongers were granted residence permits by 2020, almost double the total of the previous year. Since the security law came into force, several countries – including Australia and Canada – have opened new immigration routes for Hong Kong residents. And in the US, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on February 1 that the country should provide a refuge to Hong Kong “victims of repression by Chinese authorities.”

The United Kingdom, the former colonial lord of the territory, has received the biggest welcome and invited holders of British National (Overseas) (BN (O)) passports to apply for a new type of visa establishing a path to citizenship. About 5.2 million Hong Kong residents, or two-thirds of the 7.5 million residents, are eligible to take on the UK on its offer. According to the British government, as many as 1 million people will leave in the next five years.

In time, the exodus could recreate the political and financial landscape of Hong Kong, with one study predicting This year alone, there is only $ 36 billion in capital outflows. The flight will only accelerate the integration of the area with China on the mainland, which has shown that people and money need to be pumped across the border, among other things by encouraging more Chinese companies to list in Hong Kong.

The history of Hong Kong has, of course, been shaped by migrations – inbound and outbound – that are often caused by political unrest. Mainlanders fled here after Mao Zedong’s communists conquered China in 1949 and in the decades after young ‘freedom swimmers’ ventured out to sea to escape the Cultural Revolution.

Rich people left the city in times of uncertainty, including after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and before the handover in 1997, when the United Kingdom handed over sovereignty to China. They have landed in London, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto and other cosmopolitan areas. Many returned after realizing that the People’s Liberation Army’s tanks were not unrolling in Queen’s Road Central, which is why present – day Hong Kong has more than 300,000 Canadian dual citizens.

The best escape route leads to the UK these days After China introduced the Security Act on June 30 without local debate, Boris Johnson’s government described the move as a ‘clear and serious’ violation of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which China promised. not to change Hong Kong’s way of life 50 years after the handover. London hit back with the new visa for holders of BN (O) passports – created before the city’s return to the Chinese government in 1997 – which would enable them to stay in the UK and obtain citizenship if they at least 180 days per year for five stay years.

At least 7,000 Hong Kongers have already arrived in the UK before the January 31 visa application window opens. The only probable reason not yet followed is the UK’s horrific handling of Covid-19, with a daily caseload of around 20,000. (Hong Kong’s total throughout the pandemic is less than 11,000 infected.) With the UK making rapid progress with vaccinations, the number of new arrivals is likely to skyrocket: a UK impact study suggests anywhere from a midpoint of 320,000 to more as a million Hong Kongers will take up its offer in five years.

For Tak, a recent arrival in London, who asked for his full name to be withheld out of concern for his family, there is now no return. Born and trained in Hong Kong, he worked at one of the global banks in the city and spent lunch and weekends attending rallies and weekends during the protests. He says previous emigrants returned home after the handover, when the city was prosperous and China did not openly threaten.

Now it’s different, he says. The harsh way in which China’s leadership is handling Hong Kong’s pro – democracy movement shows that it does not care about endangering the city’s status as one of the world’s financial hubs. Concerned about the deteriorating political climate, his family drew up foreign accounts and withdrew their 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 subjugate Hong Kongers as it Uighurs, members of an ethnic minority in western China who were forced into detention camps. “Once Hong Kong loses its importance as a financial center, people in Hong Kong will suffer the same fate,” he says.