BOZUL
JU
ك
989
Hong Kong
HKC0404
RECEIV
STRY -6 MAR 1990
(for members of the Executive Committee ECOTRY /4
INDEA
Action Taken
This Introduction to Committee Paper J Is based largely on conversations with people recently returned from Hong Kong, but the opinions expressed are my own.
It is said that the panic of June and July has gone, but so also has some of that new sense of togetherness which the people of Hong Kong had discovered.
The earlier post-Tiananmen Square phase has been overtaken by a more calculating readjustment to what is perceived to be the new reality, and the response is being described as a reaction Chinese culture has always tended to make, particularly in times of crisis.
In place of the initial panic reaction there is now a pervasive steady pressure which says that your family is your first responsibility. Your responsibility to your family requires you to get yourself and your family out of Hong Kong. Now this is potentially very de-stabilising, and the authorities ought to be worried stiff by this new development. Parents in their 50's and 60's, who represent a very powerful force in Chinese culture, are telling their children that they are behaving irresponsibly if they do not now make provision to leave.
Young professionals in the 28 - 38 age range, with young families and as yet not fully established and committed in their professions, are thought to be the most likely group to leave in large numbers, with or without a "right of abode". They, as it were, are in the market, and the market is actively recruiting people with specifically targetted recruitment drives. 1/3 of Hong Kong's trained psychiatric nurses have left; last year 20% of Hong Kong's doctors left; companies are finding themselves stripped of computer technicians, and some must now be seriously considering the possibility of relocation.
However this is not just a professional, middle class. presin se occygatá ̃¦¤£îîîvation a Current wage limit as low as HK $ 1200 pm, the Singapore Embassy was besieged with people wanting application forms, and this was all happening in the middle of typhoon type weather.
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It seems that the events of June 4 suddenly made it possible to acknowledge previously suppressed anxieties, and it became publicly acceptable to do so. People were confronted, perhaps for the first time, with the significance for them of the change in their status from British citizens to British Overseas Nationals. One of the factors in this was when the British Embassy in Beijing was perceived to be conspicuously more reluctant to offer consular assistance to Chinese Hong Kong people than were, for example, the American and French Embassies to their own citizens of Chinese origin. This feeling has been reinforced more recently in Macao where a Chinese Government Official has been reported as saying that after 1997 Hong Kong residents of Chinese origin, whatever their nationality, cannot
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