Hong Kong Migration Continues Amid Pandemic, Politics

Bangkok — 

Thousands of weary residents are leaving Hong Kong every day as the city continues to battle its worst wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But an exodus of Hong Kong residents has been taking place for a couple of years, data suggests.

Experts say residents are leaving because of the city’s recent political unrest and ongoing restrictions due to the pandemic.

Recent data

According to immigration data, over 94,000 Hong Kong residents have departed the city via Hong Kong International Airport in 2022 alone, with 26,000 residents arriving. It is not clear whether the departures are permanent or temporary.

Hong Kong has required lengthy quarantines for residents and professionals entering the city making it an unattractive prospect for residents to travel overseas.

Vera Yuen, a business lecturer at the Hong Kong University (HKU), said the length of the departures would depend on two factors.

“Regarding this wave of exodus, there are two main reasons, the first related to the political developments in Hong Kong, and the second related to the tightening of travel restrictions and social distancing measures in response to COVID-19. The first is likely to be a permanent change, and the second is likely to be temporary.”

“If the current travel restrictions and quarantine measures remain for a sustained period, these temporary exoduses may become permanent,” she said.

COVID-19

Hong Kong is facing its worst coronavirus infection rate to date. With the rapid spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant, the city has recorded more cases in 2022 than in the previous two years combined.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has ordered compulsory testing for all 7.4 million residents in March, while rumors of lockdowns have unsettled the population with residents scrambling for food and resources, leaving some supermarket shelves empty.

Julius, a former landscape project manager from Hong Kong, told VOA he is considering leaving the city.

“We used to have a large amount of civil societies, NGOs, or even elected legislative and district councillors to provide neighborhood aid. But after the introduction of [the] national security law, disqualification of councillors and dissolution [of] the civil society, this is one of the reasons that Hong Kong people are now hoarding food and daily supplies.”

“It’s hard for us to look for jobs. There’s no similar positions available and due to the epidemic, other industries are streamlining their manpower as well,” he added.

FILE – Residents line up to get tested for the coronavirus at a temporary testing center despite the rain in Hong Kong, Feb. 22, 2022.

Following the anti-government protests in 2019, Beijing enacted a national security law in Hong Kong. It strictly prohibits acts deemed as secession, subversion, foreign collusion and terrorism, carrying a maximum of life in prison. Street protests have stopped, while civil societies and independent media outlets have closed. At least 150 dissidents have been arrested, including dozens of democratic lawmakers.

Discontent with living in Hong Kong under the new conditions was shown in Hong Kong’s legislative council elections in December, with only 30.2% of the population casting votes.

Population decline 2020

According to data released by the Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong recorded a population decline of 1.2% in 2020, approximately 89,200 people, the same year the security law took effect.

A Hong Kong government representative denied the population decline was due to the law.

But Yuen said the recent population decline is no surprise to the pro-democracy opposition, many of whom are in jail and are facing charges under the security law, following their roles in the protests two-and-half years ago.

“[It is] not surprising to the opposition. The surprise is that the change came so quickly.”

Yuen said the trend of people leaving Hong Kong would continue amid recent political trauma in the city. She referred to the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing in 1989, when China’s armed forces killed an unknown number of pro-democracy demonstrators following large-scale demonstrations.

The ‘Pillar of Shame’ statue, a memorial to those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, is removed from the University of Hong Kong, Dec. 23, 2021.

“Estimates suggested that after Tiananmen, around half-a-million Hong Kongers emigrated in the ensuing years.”

“It will [continue]. There is a lot to prepare for migration. Early adopters prompt late adopters to think of leaving. What Hong Kong society will become and how the government will govern will further affect the intention to leave or to stay.”

BNO, Cheng

Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997 when the city was returned to China.

Following the implementation of the security law in 2020, Britain offered a lifeboat plan to millions of Hong Kong residents.

British National Overseas (BNO) passport holders from Hong Kong now can work and study in Britain for five years and can apply for citizenship afterward. A recent amendment by British lawmakers has extended the plan to Hong Kong residents 18 to 25 years old.

According to data from the British government as of December, 103,900 BNO applications had been received.

“The U.K. has been the most favored destination for Hong Kong people who plan to leave,” Joseph Cheng, a political analyst formerly of Hong Kong, told VOA.

“The deteriorating pandemic situation in Hong Kong has become a further push factor as small businesses fail and job losses increase.”

“Given the expectation that Beijing’s Hong Kong policy will be maintained, the momentum of the exodus will not decline for at least one or two years,” Cheng added.

Economy

But Yuen believes Hong Kong is still an attractive option for professional talent. In 2019, Hong Kong’s economy dropped into a two-year recession before rebounding last year with 6.4% growth.

“If the pandemic measure will be eased and business is still thriving in Hong Kong, top talents will come back.”

“For homegrown top talents, still the low tax and competitive wage in Hong Kong is quite attractive. If they choose to leave, they will likely make a big monetary sacrifice on top of separating from their families and friends. It’s never easy.”

Politics Keep Oozing Into Olympic Limelight in China

San Francisco — 

Despite its repeated insistence that other countries keep politics out of the 2022 Winter Olympics, host country China is using the quadrennial sports showcase to promote its own political messages in subtle ways, observers say.

As examples they cite the selection of a soldier who was injured fighting Indian troops as an Olympic torch bearer, and the appearance of a member of the nation’s beleaguered Uyghur minority in a pre-Games cauldron lighting ceremony.

Analysts point to shifts in geopolitics since Beijing hosted the country’s first Olympics in the summer of 2008. Chinese relations with Western countries such as the United States were closer that year than now, while COVID-19 was more than a decade away from making its first appearance — in China. Chinese control over Hong Kong, its touchy relationship with Australia and flyovers near Taiwan had also not hit their current-day fervor.

“Politics are inevitably involved when athletes compete wearing their national flags,” said Leif-Eric Easley, an associate professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But because of China’s human rights issues, aggressive foreign policies and the COVID-19 pandemic, an atmosphere of distrust surrounds the Beijing Winter Games.”

Chinese officials reject the idea the country has introduced politics into the Games.

The Beijing Winter Olympics are “a grand gathering of global winter sports athletes and fans, rather than a platform for certain politicians’ political stunts,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian said in December.

India, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, global Muslims

Nevertheless, when Indian officials spotted the appearance of a People’s Liberation Army regiment commander, Qi Fabao, bearing an Olympic torch earlier this month, they announced that New Delhi would not send officials to the February 4-20 event. Qi’s head was injured as he fought Indian soldiers in the deadly 2020 Galwan Valley clash with China over a disputed border

And one of two Chinese athletes who joined a pre-Games cauldron lighting ceremony was cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang, who is ethnically Uyghur. Western governments and human rights groups believe China is repressing the political and religious freedoms of other Uyghurs, a largely Muslim group in the country’s Xinjiang region.

China’s handling of Uyghurs resonated with Malaysians, who are also predominantly Muslim. From 2017 into 2019, Uyghurs living in the Southeast Asian country brought the issue to the public’s attention, said Ibrahim Suffian, program director with the polling group Merdeka Center in Kuala Lumpur.

Now, even though Malaysia sent two alpine skiers to the Beijing Games this month, many Malays there aren’t watching the Games on television, he said. Ethnic Chinese Malaysians are more likely to watch as they like seeing China play host.

“I would imagine people who are watching China would feel it’s politicized, but the Malaysian public is divided,” Suffian said.

There has also been an outcry in South Korea over what some say is China’s “appropriation” of Korean culture, Easley said.

The appearance of a woman wearing hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, as one of China’s ethnic minority groups at the opening ceremony angered people in South Korea who took the display as a Chinese claim to a part of Korean culture.

“Already there has been controversy over the use of hanbok traditional dress at the opening ceremony … and whether Seoul should have joined other U.S. allies in a diplomatic boycott,” Easley said.

In another hint of politics, one state-run China Central TV announcer called the Taiwanese Olympic team “China, Taipei” rather than by its official label, Chinese Taipei, CNN reported. China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan and its officials prefer names that link the island to their country.

Diplomatic boycotts and diplomatic meetings

In the two months before Beijing’s Games, 15 countries including the U.S. declared “diplomatic boycotts” of the event, saying government officials would not attend the Games, often citing human rights issues in China.

Following the U.S. diplomatic boycott, Zhao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said, “The Winter Olympics is not a stage for political posturing and manipulation.”

However, diplomatic meetings and political discourse have been taking place at the Beijing Games.

China and Russia issued a statement hours before the Games opened opposing the expansion of the Western military alliance NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was visiting Beijing at the time, says Western powers have broken promises about expanding the formerly anti-Soviet alliance, and his country has massed troops near its border with Ukraine.

The two old allies asked NATO to “abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches.”

And Chinese leadership invited Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to the opening ceremonies, where the two sides signed or concluded a number of agreements in areas ranging from infrastructure and space to sports and culture.

Bond between sports, politics?

Chinese officials associate the development of elite sports to their status as a rising power, according to a 2017 Hong Kong Baptist University study. China’s history of equating sports with its national image has primed Olympics observers overseas to watch for signs of politics in the Games, said Mark Thomas, managing director of the U.K.-based, China-event-focused S2M Group sports consultancy.

“China and politics and sports are one and the same thing, and I think that in many ways there are problems,” Thomas said. “That’s one of the reasons maybe why certain commentators in the West see China’s use of sports as just a tool for statecraft in terms of positioning itself as a growing, emerging and eventually dominant power in the world.”

The rise of China since the 2008 Games has some foreign countries hoping this year’s Olympics somehow “fail,” said Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington. China has become more “irritating” in response, she said.

“Domestically, the Chinese are trying to manipulate this event into a patriotism-boosting ceremony, but that inevitably gets into the sticky question of China’s relationships with the countries that it has had problems with,” Sun said.

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