Peter Eng was barely old enough to understand what was happening when he saw the Japanese army march into Hong Kong in 1941. His knowledge of world politics was still being developed when, as an eight-year-old boy, he watched British troops return four years later. But in late June, as he prepares to witness the handover of the colony back to China, the Vancouver-based businessman is armed with a much keener sense of history. “I want to compare the appearance of the People’s Liberation Army with my memories,” says Mr. Eng, 60, who moved to Canada 30 years ago and has written a book on Hong Kong’s history. “A lot has been said about the transition, but in my opinion it’s something that calls for celebration.”
Many Hong Kong people who have immigrated to Canada feel the same way. In a recent Angus Reid poll of ethnic Chinese in Greater Vancouver, more than half said the transfer will be “a good thing” for people living in Hong Kong. But the B.C. population as a whole is far less optimistic – and a significant number (39%) think it may hurt this province as well, either by bringing in too many immigrants or by slowing down foreign trade and economic growth.
Yet despite those worries, there has been very little discussion of what could happen here if the handover goes badly. The Communist regime in China has tried to reassure the world that life in Hong Kong will not change much after July 1, but there are already signs that freedoms enjoyed by its 6.4 million residents are about to deteriorate. One week before the handover, incoming governor Tung Chee-hwa said he would reject a law giving lighter penalties for speaking out against the government. Protesters will likely need police permission before taking to the streets, and new elections to replace the appointed legislature won’t be held for at least a year, if at all. And in perhaps the most ominous sign yet, the new regime is bringing 21 armoured vehicles and 4,000 troops with it for the handover.
Nor does the history of the Chinese Communists inspire hope that all will go smoothly in Hong Kong. Since assuming power in the 1940s, the regime is believed responsible for killing an estimated 50 million people. While most of that massive slaughter of Chinese citizens occurred in the Communists’ early years, the memory of the June 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, when army tanks were used to break up a pro-democracy rally, is still fresh. And there are new reports every year of torture, execution of political activists and rampant corruption.
In the past, repression in communist countries has led to waves of people arriving in Canada. Nearly 50,000 people from Hungary and Czechoslovakia came here after Soviet crackdowns in those countries in the 1950s and 1960s. About 70,000 Vietnamese fleeing the Communist regime there in the late 1970s landed on Canadian shores.
Of course, the economic climate is far different in Hong Kong than it was in any of those Soviet satellite countries. While the former British colony suffers from a staggering cost of living, the taxes are low (a flat 15% of income and no sales tax) and the unemployment rate is only about 2.5%. A March poll revealed that 90% of Hong Kong residents were satisfied with life there. It is, by most standards, a booming place: an economic machine that produces more than twice as much in goods and services as British Columbia, and is growing several times faster.
And the Chinese government has already shown a far keener sense of how to make business thrive than Communists elsewhere. Yet corruption and bribery are still rife in mainland China. Even normally powerful corporations are susceptible to the unpredictable moods of the dictators; fast-food giant McDonald’s had its 30-year lease on a Tiananmen Square space yanked from it virtually without warning.
If that lack of respect for the rule of law carries over to Hong Kong, many entrepreneurs might be inclined to find a more hospitable place to do business. “The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the largest corporation in China,” says Don DeVoretz, co-director of the Centre of Excellence on Immigration and Integration, a joint project of Simon Fraser University and the University of B.C. “If they get in [business] in any significant way in Hong Kong, business people will leave. These are not people who are dedicated to doing business in Hong Kong because it’s the homeland.”
Citizenship and Immigration Canada doesn’t keep track of where people go or what they do when they leave the country, so it’s hard to know exactly who makes up the estimated 150,000 people with Canadian passports living in Hong Kong. According to Prof. DeVoretz, the best guess is that most of them fall into one of two groups: middle-aged businessmen or young graduates – many with degrees from SFU or UBC – who were lured there by the hot job market. Both groups would be affected by a radical change in the business climate.
About 50,000 of those people would likely settle in Vancouver if they ever return to Canada, says Prof. DeVoretz. But if the handover goes badly, the real unknown becomes the number of Canadians from Hong Kong who might apply to bring family members here. Canadian immigration rules allow people to sponsor immediate relatives – a spouse, fiance, children, parents, grandparents – as long as they can prove their ability to support them financially. Most Hong Kong immigrants can. If the sponsor meets the criteria, the overseas relative is usually assured entry into Canada, provided they aren’t a security or criminal threat and don’t have any serious medical problems. With about 500,000 Hong Kong immigrants currently residing in Canada, approximately one million relatives still in the Asian city could qualify for entry. “There’s a huge potential overhang [of family-class immigrants],” notes Prof. DeVoretz.
Could tens of thousands of these people try to flee Hong Kong for Canada? Those with business interests in Hong Kong or China have been reluctant to consider the idea that the handover will be anything but smooth, at least publicly.
Instead, most have echoed the line that Beijing will not do anything to imperil the money-making machine that Hong Kong has become. David Bond, chief economist for the Hongkong Bank of Canada, points out the Chinese government has poured $32 billion into Hong Kong in the 1ast five years. “This is a strategic showcase,” says the economist, whose parent company has 250 outlets in Hong Kong. “If they screw up this one, what does it say?” Mr. Eng, who is chairman of the Allied Holdings Group, which builds offices and hotels in China, says the handover will create even more wealth for Hong Kong, and “open new horizons.” The Hong Kong trade office in Toronto weighed in with a large ad in the Vancouver Sun that oozed optimism. “It will be very much ‘business as usual,’” the ad declared. “This is not wishful thinking — this is a fact.”
Others contend that no matter what happens, almost everyone who wanted to move here has already done so. Immigration from Hong Kong to Canada has started to slow down, dropping from a peak of 44,000 in 1994 to about 30,000 last year. Through April, it was on pace to drop again this year.
Furthermore, many observers believe jobs and money, not political freedom, are the most important considerations to Hong Kongers. “If the economic development goes along smoothly, the business is OK, most people will stay,” predicts Joseph Tse, assignment editor in the Vancouver office of Ming Pao, one of the city’s two Chinese daily newspapers.
Therefore, if the Communists do put ideology before economics and choke the life out of Hong Kong’s commerce immediately, any exodus might be barely perceptible at first. On the other hand, if the PLA were to start crushing protests the way it did in 1989, it’s not unreasonable to expect a sudden rush of people wanting to flee. The Tiananmen massacre was a key factor in the most recent wave of Hong Kong immigrants; after it happened, the number of residents immigrating to Canada doubled within three years. “It awakened them politically,” says Earl Drake, who was Canada’s ambassador to China at the time.
In either event, a large influx of Hong Kong immigrants would have important consequences for the province, especially Greater Vancouver, which typically absorbs more than 95% of all B.C.-bound Hong Kong immigrants. Exactly how the city would change is hard to tell, but it’s worth considering the impact of the most recent wave, which brought some 60,000 Hong Kongers into the city in the past five years.
Economically, those immigrants are partially responsible for B.C.’s continued growth through the 1990’s, says Prof. Voretz. But their effect is “extremely selective,” he adds. The beneficiaries tend to be people selling and building furniture, upper-end homes, and cars. But other companies with the ability to cater to the Chinese market can improve business as well. For example, says the professor BC Tel is doing well in the long-distance market because it provides Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking operators.
But there have been losers as well. Small businesses that can’t afford to hire multilingual employees miss out on a large segment of the market with money to spend. Prof. DeVoretz tells the story of the jeweller who had just closed a store in rapidly-growing Richmond. When he asked why, she replied: “My Richmond customers did not speak English well enough for me to serve them.”
In fact, higher levels of immigration from Hong Kong would probably strengthen the “parallel economy” that has developed along linguistic lines in Greater Vancouver. Most ethnic Chinese, for example, only support driver-education schools run by other Chinese, says Prof. DeVoretz. “There’s a solitude formed here.”
Still, Hong Kong immigration has been a bonus for cash-hungry governments. Most immigrants have higher-than-average incomes, and almost none of them go on welfare, says Prof. DeVoretz, so the typical Hong Kong immigrant family pays far more in taxes than it uses in public services.
But the immigrant boom also causes a major strain in some public institutions, and creates social tensions as well, particularly in schools. For example, enrolment in Richmond schools is projected to rise to 23,700 in the fall – a 16% jump since 1991-92. That growth has been almost entirely fuelled by Chinese immigrant students. At the same time, the number of students who need training in English as a Second Language (ESL) has nearly tripled.
The result? One-third of Richmond’s high school students are crammed into portable classrooms. Systemwide, two out of five students require some kind of ESL attention, and parents of English-speaking children complain about the extra money and teachers’ time it takes. (The “two solitudes” are at work here as well; the Chinese community in Richmond has its own separate parents’ association.)
A rapid infusion of still more students from Hong Kong would worsen the crowding problem, at least until the district can get more schools built. And if it happened during the summer, after its budget had been set, it would leave administrators scrambling for more teachers. “I don’t know how you can plan [for it],” says deputy secretary-treasurer Al Kungel. “you just can’t.”
One thing the Hong Kong influx hasn’t caused is a significant increase in crime. In fact, Asian immigrants are vastly under-represented in B.C.’s prisoner population, says Robert Gordon, a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University, who has studied the links between immigration and crime. Would that change if more people immigrated? “It would depend on who comes,” says Prof. Gordon. “So far, the people who have to come into Canada, I suspect, have tended to be middle class and above.” To date, the few Hong Kong immigrants who’ve committed crimes here tend to be involved in “group” crimes, such as prostitution, drugs, and extortion.
Even if many think it unlikely that thousands of people will flee the new Hong Kong, the prospect is clearly on the minds of many British Columbians. An Angus Reid survey in March found that of those who thought the handover will have a negative impact on B.C., 26% believed it will result in too many immigrants. That was cited more than any other reason. (On the whole, Chinese people surveyed in Greater Vancouver tend to see the handover as a much more positive thing. But of those who view it negatively, most think it will hurt the B.C. economy.)
More to the point, immigration matters need to be discussed and debated, because the number of people who believe Canada allows too many immigrants is growing, says Prof. DeVoretz. “We have to face the facts that now six out of 10 Canadians are mildly or strongly against immigration,” he says. “Policy cannot be so far out of step with reality.” There is perhaps another equally compelling reason to care about what happens in Hong Kong in the coming years. If the worst aspects of the Chinese Communists seep into the new Hong Kong government, there is a huge potential for human suffering.
Last year, human rights watchdog Amnesty International reported that “the situation in China is the most serious it has been for a long time.” Among other things, the report stated that people suspected of stealing sometimes had boiling water poured on them or electric prods placed on their genitals; it was not rare for them to die during interrogation. Nor were such measures saved just for criminals suspects or political protesters. “Torture and arbitrary detention... happen to people from all walks of life for all sorts of reasons,” Amnesty International asserted.
Despite that record, Canada – like other Western countries eyeing the large Chinese market – has been reluctant to discuss worst-case scenarios in the handover. And perhaps the Chinese really will let “business as usual” continue in Hong Kong, but even some of the optimists add a note of caution. Jim Pickles, who is in charge of accounting firm KPMG’s Pacific Rim practice, asks: “Once it is out of the public spotlight, who knows if China will meet its commitments?”
Economist DeVoretz, one of the country’s most respected immigration watchers, doesn’t expect a mass exodus from Hong
Kong. The more likely scenario is a “slow strangulation of civil life,” which will eventually convince most Canadians there to return home. “In six months to a year,” says the professor, “I think things will start changing.”
– Derek DeCloet
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