Hong Kong on Borrowed Time

Posted by fesstrasrey on December 10th, 2020

EARLIER THIS MONTH, WHILE CHINA'S LEADERS WERE staging a grandiose celebration of their revolution's 40th birthday, thousands of somber Hong Kong residents gathered for a dreary commemoration of their own. Far from the fireworks display in Beijing, Hong Kongers huddled in a rainstorm near the bronze statue of Queen Victoria, singing patriotic songs and listening to mournful poems dedicated to those who died in Tiananmen Square.

Since the Beijing massacres on June 4, Hong Kong has become a city frightened of its future and obsessed with one date - July 1, 1997, when Membangun Fanpage untuk Jualan Online di Facebook Britain is to return its colony to China. (Box, page 32.) The city of almost six million is increasingly torn between those who already have a foreign passport or can obtain one, and the 60 percent or so who cannot afford to leave or are unwanted elsewhere.

Hong Kongers are pursuing the possibility of flight with the same diligence they show in making money. Banks and financial institutions are concocting ways to snare passports for their senior staff. Smooth-talking representatives from Singapore, Fiji, Thailand, Canada come offering foreign travel documents - for a price. A glitzy shopping mall recently became the scene of a near-riot when some 30,000 people scrambled to get application forms for permanent residence in Singapore. Even American Congressmen such as Stephen Solarz have joined in, visiting the colony with proposals to admit more Hong Kongers to the United States.

To Hong Kong's business moguls no survival scenario seems too farfetched: Some suggest moving Hong Kong to a spot near Darwin, Australia; others propose the west coast of Scotland; still others argue the United Nations should lease Hong Kong from China and turn it into ''the Switzerland of Asia.''