Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/01/britain-offers-citizenship-to.html
…
9 Likes
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the states need to join in with them to absorb their share of the potential refugees.
30 Likes
China has effectively broken their international agreement with Britain about Hong Kong, is there gonna be any ramifications to this like sanctions?
21 Likes
23 years too late
15 Likes
For the second time this week I’m forced back to
ROFLMAO!
With Brexit, Boris Badenough will be desperate not to piss off ANY trading partner by imposing sanctions. As if they’d make one iota of difference given the imbalance in that relationship, economically. It’s pretty risky offering HK citizens the chance to escape, as it is - you can bet Xi will not look well on that!
11 Likes
This seems like a good thing which I can’t fault.
That doesn’t mean the UK (under Tory governments in particular) has a great record with former overseas subjects overall. Or that they haven’t fucked people over by implying rights which turned out to be highly contingent on domestic politics (e.g. Ugandan Asians in the seventies. or Windrush immigrants under the May regime).
But if it turns out that large numbers of people (a) want to immigrate from Honk Honk and (b) are able to do so without dickery, then I fully support our shithead government of goblin cretins in this case.
I assume they’ve calculated that no one will take them up on the offer, or expect more financial businesses to move here and ruin stuff without paying tax, or have some other shabby motive. But we’ll see.
11 Likes
I more meant from the international community.
This is probably Boris’ solution to the lack of fruit pickers available to harvest England’s fields come autumn.
4 Likes
In a way this is what the PRC wants. They won’t have to deal with democratic agitators if they gets absorbed into Western nations. All that will be left are people willing to tolerate PRC rule. Home and family can make leaving hard, even if it means submitting to an authoritarian rule.
The few that stay and fight, will disappear over the next few years, and the West will probably do nothing about it.
I sincerely wish the people of Hong Kong win this, and get to keep their home and Basic Law. I see no way for them to win this peacefully, maybe I’m a pessimist, but there will be no victory without a long violent confrontation that continuously places pressure on the international community. It seems the only way to be heard is when you’re covered in blood. 
11 Likes
I know it’s an autocorrect failure but it still made me smile.
9 Likes
Understood. Though not many have the balls and economic might to face up to Xi.
So the choice for Hong Kong residents is: be subject to the PRC or make the jump to the UK in the middle of the Brexit shit-show (which is being so badly managed, there’s a real possibility of food shortages after January). It’s not a great couple of options.
(Also interesting to see how the Tories square this with all the fuss they’ve been making about keeping out immigrants, to the point where they were crowing about losing their own freedom of movement.)
Plus, anyone who moves out but leaves family behind will have their family used as hostages by the Chinese government if they become politically active.
13 Likes
Oh, that was no failure
3 Likes
Then you made me smile on purpose
2 Likes
I expect this wave will be much larger.
4 Likes
100% agree, though in Canada’s case, Trudeau doesn’t have the spine to do it. Relations with China are already precarious due to Meng Wanzhou and the kidnapped Canadians. I don’t think he’d risk more Canadian hostages at the moment.
3 Likes
To be fair though, the people of Hong Kong who are most likely to leave are well educated, hard-working, and democracy-loving, exactly the kind of people Western Democracies should invite, especially as your population is aging.
8 Likes
Of course my understanding is that this only applies to those HKers born before the handover. Of course the UK could at some theoretical level, decide that this would also apply to everybody born South of Boundary street, since the 99 year lease that expired in 97 applied only to the New Territories, not to the island or Kowloon. But that is not going to happen.
I’m sure that Trump will warn ICE to be on the look out for them; they sound exactly like the kind of people he isn’t looking for come voting day.
1 Like
Here’s a different perspective - think of it like a Machete, and your cutting thru post colonial sneaky (english establishment) arrogance. Sneaky as in 3 million new loyal voters might help things.
Anthony Sheridan: Hong Kong And Democracy
Hong Kong belongs to the Chinese in exactly the same way as the Isle of Wight belongs to the British.
Here’s how Britain came to own Hong Kong. In the 19th century the British East Indian Company was making huge profits in the illegal smuggling of drugs [opium] into China.
This criminal activity did serious damage to the Chinese economy and resulted in widespread drug addiction among the population.The Chinese authorities appealed to Queen Victoria to stop the drug trade, she ignored them. The authorities then offered to allow the merchants to trade in tea in place of opium but this too was rejected. As a last resort the authorities confiscated supplies of opium and imposed a blockade of foreign ships. The British responded by going to war. They defeated the Chinese and in the subsequent peace treaty demanded and were given ownership of Hong Kong. For the next 150 years Hong Kong was ruled from London through a British appointed governor, there was no democracy under British rule .
Hong Kong citizens were never happy with this lack of democracy and frequently rebelled. In 1856, for example, when a very limited form of democracy was suggested the Colonial Office rejected the idea on the grounds that: ‘Chinese residents had no respect for the principles upon which social order rests.’
The current Chinese dictatorship holds the exact same anti-democratic view. Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong before the territory was handed back to the Chinese in 1997, is outraged by this anti-democratic policy. Here’s some of what he had to say in a recent article:
“The world simply cannot trust this Chinese regime. Liberal democracies and friends of Hong Kong everywhere must make it clear that they will stand up for this great, free and dynamic city.”
But Patten’s complaints are futile and hypocritical.
They are futile because China is now an empire and Britain a mere backwater on the world stage. They are hypocritical because the Chinese are not doing anything the British did not do during their occupation of Hong Kong. And there’s another important point, Hong Kong is geographically and culturally part of China. Britain, on the other hand is nearly six thousand miles away from its former colony.
Let’s imagine a reversal of history. Let’s imagine that China was the most powerful empire in the world in the 19th century and went to war with Britain because it was prevented from selling illegal drugs to the British people. Let’s imagine that after defeat the British were forced to hand over the Isle of Wight to the Chinese. Fast forward to the present day and the Chinese, having lost their empire, are forced by the British to give the island back.
How would the British respond if the former Chinese colonists, from six thousand miles away in Beijing, began to lecture London on how they should govern the newly liberated territory .
I think we know the answer to that. China agreed to give some political and social autonomy to Hong Kong through a ‘one country, two systems’ policy for a 50 year period. That a ruthless communist regime should actually honour that promise for nearly half that period is nothing short of a miracle. Again, if the situation was reversed, would the UK honour such an agreement, particularly if its political and commercial interests were threatened – highly unlikely. And it is principally commercial interests that lie behind the, so far, relatively benign response by the Chinese government to events in Hong Kong. The city is an extremely rich capitalist money-making machine and China is fast becoming the most powerful and richest capitalist country in the world.
The Chinese government want two things, to continue sharing the wealth generated by Hong Kong but, at the same time, exercise total political power over its citizens. In a word – they want capitalism but not democracy. And that policy is a carbon-copy of the policy imposed by the British during their undemocratic rule of the territory.
Anthony Sheridan is a freelance journalist and blogs at PublicEnquiry.
5 Likes
