any visitor there. On one day during a recent visit for a
conference, the front page story in the local press was of a
bone marrow operation and of the skill of the hospital staff
in Hong Kong who achieved success. The point of the story
not the high professionalism and the standard of medical
skills in Hong Kong: unrivalled in the region. Its point
was that the demonstrated skills ensured for those involved
their ticket of exit joining the drain of treasure and
talent from Hong Kong before 1997.
And on the second day of the conference, the overseas
delegates descending in their bus from the University,
perched on the mountain, to the international hotel where the
conference was held, saw a telling sight.
a
A queue wound its
way down
On and on it went: well dressed
down the mountain.
in
a
quiet people standing with umbrellas in the gentle rain.
That is a long bus queue, we observed. Unusual
Territory otherwise well served with public transport. But
then the end of the queue was finally reached.
It terminated
This was a queue of
at the gates of the American Mission.
Hong Kong people seeking visas to emigrate to the United
States of America. There are similar queues at the Missions
of Canada and Australia and doubtless elsewhere.
Those people were demonstrating their real concern
about the future. That concern has at its heart an anxiety
about the future of the rule of the law and respect for
individual rights. The level of that
of that anxiety was most
clearly demonstrated in the vivid enlarged photograph which
stood at the front of the conference on its final day. It
was a photograph of more than a million citizens of Hong
They had emptied from their houses and offices and
Kong.
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