such easy assurances would be powerless to prevent it.
Ministers have also argued that to grant an effective citizenship to non-Chinese BDTCs in Hong Kong would be racially discriminatory.
It is a peculiarly ironic twist in Britain's twisted citizenship and immigration laws that those who advocate special treatment for the minorities in Hong Kong should be accused of racial discrimination by a government which passed legislation to freeze into British nationality law the racial divisions of British immigration legislation. The ethnic minority communities in Hong Kong are in their present position precisely because they are caught between two racially discriminatory nationality laws: a Chinese law which says that only those of Chinese race are automatically citizens of China, and a British law which created five second-class citizenships for non-white British nationals. That law was morally indefensible and has indeed left many Chinese BDTCS in Hong Kong feeling that they have been sold out; but it would be doubly unjust if their situation were to be used as an excuse for failing to act to relieve the plight of an even more disadvantaged group.
But, precisely because citizenship issues in Hong Kong are so sensitive, many, particularly in the Hong Kong government, would argue that in order to preserve the unity and therefore the stability of Hong Kong, there should be no special concessions for any particular group; this would be resented and could set one group against another.
Yet immigration and nationality status have already created deep divisions in Hong Kong. There are some obvious divisions - between the 34 million British nationals, the 150,000 foreign nationals, the 2 million Chinese immigrants who are Chinese nationals but at present have only certificates of identity, and the 11,000 refugees from Indo-China who are effectively stateless and not even officially landed in Hong Kong. But even among those who are British nationals there are important divisions.
About 17,000 people already have full British citizenship and therefore the right of abode in Britain. In some cases, this is because they are expatriates from the UK; but in other cases they are people of mixed race, or people who went to live in Britain many years ago and acquired right of abode because of five years' residence and settlement in the UK. The acquisition of full British citizenship can appear quite arbitrary: Eurasians with British-born mothers are excluded, while those whose fathers were born in Britain are
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