The characters in the tattoo above say “Hong Kong” (香港) if read vertically and “add oil” (加油) if turned horizontally; together, 香港加油, or “Hong Kong, add oil!” This was a protest slogan HongKongers shouted to each other in encouragement (a bit like, “Come on, Hong Kong!” or “Let’s go, Hong Kong!”). This particular design was conceived by the Taiwanese graphic designer Kyo Chan. I imagine all HK emigrants carry the spirit tattooed on their hearts no matter where in the world they may land.
“Diaspora” is a continuation of “An Exile.” That was about departure from Hong Kong and arrival in a new place. This focuses on the period of settling in and adaptation.
Both are intended as sequel to the book, Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the freedom struggle, which is about the 2019–2020 protests. That in turn follows As long as there is resistance, there is hope about the period from 2014 to 2018, and Umbrella: A Political Tale from Hong Kong about the 2014 Umbrella Movement.
“Diaspora” will appear in installments. The previous installment was “Photo of a candle.”
The emigration statistics in “And shalt be dispersed” are accurate as of March 2023.
2. And shalt be dispersed…
διασπορά έν πάσαις βασιλείαις τής γής (diaspora en pasais basileias tēs gēs)
….and shalt be dispersed into all the kingdoms of the earth.
—Deuteronomy 28:25
The word “diaspora” comes from the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The full verse: “The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies: thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them: and shalt be dispersed into all the kingdoms of the earth.” The context: God’s laws for his people have just been laid down. There are blessings for those who follow his laws, and curses for those who don’t. Diaspora—being scattered across the face of the earth—is a curse, a punishment.
The frequency of the word’s usage in English has exploded over the last few decades, starting in the 1980s, presumably because so many more peoples have been scattered across the earth, or perhaps just as much because of a greater recognition of this scattering as a distinct phenomenon, and of such groups as having distinct identities. By now the term has, for most, lost the Biblical connotation of opprobrium, misfortune and compulsion (“…and shalt be dispersed”—it’s not a choice).
The UN reckons that India, Mexico, China and Russia have the biggest diasporas in the world, followed by Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ukraine, the Philippines and Afghanistan. Of those origin countries, only Syrians and Afghans (and, more recently, Ukrainians) are primarily refugees: most of them are fleeing war and its effects. Those from the other countries on the list migrate mostly for other reasons, primarily economic.
These days tens of thousands of HK people are emigrating. Legally, very few of them are refugees or asylum seekers. Most are entering the UK as British National (Overseas) visa holders, partaking of the HK-specific scheme that allows them to reside there. But clearly, the reason most are leaving is to escape the oppressive political climate in HK and because they can only see the situation getting worse.
The HK diaspora is miniscule in comparison to those at the top of the list, most of which come from among the most populous countries in the world, but as a percentage of the population of HK, it is significant, and growing.
There are several terms in written Chinese and spoken Cantonese that roughly correspond to “diaspora”:「離散港人」(lau san heung yan—diaspora HongKonger) may be the best to apply to HK people who have recently gone abroad.「離散」 (lau san) is pretty much a direct translation of “diaspora,” right down to the metaphor of “spreading across.” Some say this term also has a melancholic or sad air to it because, after all, it’s tragic to be spread all over the place when, all else being equal, one would rather stay home, and encased within that melancholy coloring, in the specific HK context, is the tragedy which caused the exodus: our home being occupied, our future stolen from us. Other terms include「流徙港人」and 「香港移民」(Hong Kong immigrant);「流亡港人」and 「香港流亡者」(Hong Kong exile); and 海外港人 (overseas HongKonger). All are serviceable to one extent or another, but some believe there has yet to be a phrase that really captures the experience of the Hong Konger leaving HK these days or fully describes what the user wishes to say. It is as if the language to describe this new phenomenon is waiting to be born.
HK is and always has been—at least for all of its modern history—an immigrant society par excellence. Just about everyone there came from somewhere else over the past one-hundred years, and that “somewhere else” in 90-plus percent of the cases was China, to escape political turmoil, famine, oppression.
Because of HK’s status as a UK colony—part of it literally leased from the Qing dynasty for one-hundred years—, followed by its de facto status as a colony of the Chinese Communist Party under another time-limited agreement, HK has for all of its modern history been a provisional place, living on borrowed time, a way station that nevertheless over time came to gain some permanence for those who arrived and stayed. But the permanence was illusory, temporary, even more so than permanence anywhere is illusory, temporary, much more so. The political situation in particular has been eternally temporary: everyone knew its UK colonial status had to end sooner or later, lasting as it did far beyond the existence of almost all other UK colonies, and its transfer to CCP colonial rule has its temporariness built into it: the now infamously false promise of fifty years of “one country, two systems.” No one knew what would happen beyond 2047. Indeed, anyone who was paying attention recognized it was impossible to know how long into the fifty-year period even the pretense of 1c2s would last. And now that it’s abundantly clear that it didn’t make it even halfway, and the CCP’s end game of incorporating HK into its empire has come into sharper focus, that objective, the leviathan swallowing the minnow whole, too seems somehow unsustainable, subject to many possible complications, twists and turns. HK’s liminality persists. First of all, even with the CCP seeking to impose its will, it’s unclear how that will end. And secondly, with the current exodus underway, the question arises: is HK becoming more a specific identity, a state of mind, a concept and less exclusively an actual geographical place. Or is it disappearing entirely? Is it possible that a century from now, or even before then, HK as it is now understood will no longer exist?
A range of data suggests that from mid-2019 to the end of 2022, somewhere around 200,000 have left. The most precise indicator is the BN(O) visa scheme: as of the end of 2022, 160,700 Hong Kongers had applied for residence in the UK as part of the scheme, and 153,708 had been approved. Statistics from Taiwan show the number of Hong Kongers settling there is at a record high. In 2020, 12,389 Hong Kongers were granted permits to reside or permanently settle in Taiwan, a nearly 70 percent increase on the previous year; and in 2021, the number increased again to another historic high of 12,858—a total of 25,247 in those two years. From January 2022 to March 2023, the number dipped, with 7,117 being granted residence permits, for a total of 32,364. That means at least 186,072 Hong Kongers have settled or intend to settle in the UK and Taiwan alone over the past two years. The number of permanent migrants to Australia from Hong Kong was 4,312 in financial year 2020-2021, an increase of more than 300 percent over 1,391 in 2019-2020. That brings the total to 190,384. In addition to these, others have emigrated to Canada and the United States. Many others have moved abroad with non-permanent immigration visas, such as study and work visas. Virtually all of this emigration occurred during the pandemic, when it was harder to cross borders. Now that the pandemic has ebbed, will those figures increase, decrease, or level off?
The case of emigration to Canada shows the complexity and fluidity of the situation, as well as the difficulty in pinning down exactly how many have left HK. In 2021, Canada saw a big jump in all categories of immigration from Hong Kong, 3,444 Hong Kongers were granted permanent residency, compared to 1,045 in 2020 and 1,540 in 2019. 19,064 were granted study or work permits. In 2022, 7,920 study permits were issued, up from 6,314 in 2021, 2,605 in 2020, and 2,490 in 2019. Taking only new permanent residents into account would add only 6,209 to the 190,384 emigrants to the UK, Taiwan, and Australia for a total of 196,593. But probably a high percentage of those with study or work permits in Canada intend to attempt to become permanent residents. And these numbers are unlikely to fully reflect the scale of the exodus from HK to Canada. There are an estimated 335,000 Canadian citizens living in HK. Many of them originally came from Hong Kong, went to Canada in the 1990s, gained citizenship, and returned to Hong Kong. Now there’s strong anecdotal evidence—especially reports of a large number of HKers moving to the Vancouver area—that a significant number of them are moving to Canada, but since they are citizens, they’re not represented in immigration statistics, though they’ve moved from HK to Canada.
If we take 200,000 emigrants from HK as a realistic estimate, and probably an underestimate, and compare that to a population of 7,500,700 at the end of 2019, that’s around 2.7 percent of the overall population that’s left in the space of two years or so—more than one in every 50 people. Just about everyone knows someone who’s left—family, friends, classmates, workmates, enough to set in motion a new culture of emigration: relationships are reorganized and reconstructed across international borders. New identities begin to emerge: we are those who stayed, we are those who left.
Just about every sector of HK society is affected by the exodus. There is a steady stream of news reports of tearful goodbyes at the airport, of well-known people departing, more often than not because they feel at risk of persecution if they remain; indeed, we often learn of their departures only after they’ve managed to get out. I’ve documented 1,130 people who have left due to experienced or expected political persecution. There have been substantial decreases in workers reported in a number of fields. Teachers, social workers, finance industry workers, doctors and nurses are all making their exits. The Hong Kong government’s own figures show the biggest population decrease in a twelve-month period since records began in 1961, with 113,200 fewer HKers in mid-2021 than in mid-2020, and the population falling 1.6% to around 7.29 million.
It’s a highly unusual phenomenon: so many people fleeing a relatively prosperous economy that is not experiencing a catastrophe that typically results in mass displacement such as war, famine or economic collapse; in fact, it’s hard to think of a comparable example.
Mid-twentieth-century Ireland comes to mind. Ireland was famous, among both Irish and non-Irish, for emigration. In 1957, 1.8 percent of the population left the country. That was regarded as an astoundingly high figure. HK has surpassed that. But whereas general poverty and poor economic outlook were clearly the biggest push factors driving Irish emigration, the HK economy, while not thriving, has held up pretty well in comparison to many others during the pandemic. Indeed, in emigrating from HK to the UK, where most HKers are going, many can actually expect to earn less than they would if they remained. Where else does one find a mass exodus of migrants expecting lower income at their destination than at their point of origin?
Nicaragua is another point of comparison. Also relatively small in size—6.5 million versus HK’s 7.4 million—, its exodus is also driven by political repression. Nicaragua, though, lacks HK’s prosperity: it’s the second-poorest country in the western hemisphere after Haiti. But, in spite of its poverty, until recently, it did not experience huge numbers of emigrants, unlike its neighbors, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Even during its brutal civil war of the 1980s, “only” about 200,000 left over the whole decade. In 2022 alone, more than 180,000 Nicaraguans came to the US, and since 2018, 154,000 have sought asylum in Costa Rica. All told, it’s estimated that about 10 percent of Nicaragua’s population has left in the past four years.
In fact, Nicaragua’s exodus may more closely resemble Venezuela’s, with political repression and governmental mismanagement and corruption causing economic deterioration if not collapse. Even as a percentage of the overall population, the Hong Kong exodus doesn’t compare to the biggest mass displacements of recent years, those from Venezuela and Syria. Something like half of war-torn Syria’s population has been displaced, with 6.7 to 6.8 million becoming refugees and about the same number forced to move to elsewhere within Syria. About 6.1 million Venezuelans have left their economically ravaged country, a little over 20 percent of the overall population. Political strife was the underlying factor of both Syria’s war and Venezuela’s economic crisis, whereas the Hong Kong exodus has been driven almost exclusively by the drastic deterioration of the political situation and the decrease in freedom.
This is not the first mass exodus from Hong Kong. Prior to the 1997 handover, in the years 1987 to 1996, when it had become clear that the UK was giving HK to the CCP, an estimated 503,800 people emigrated, nearly nine percent of the population over the course of a decade. As noted above, 335,000 of them ended up in Canada.
Those earlier emigrants were also fleeing Communist control, but the difference is, they were leaving before the CCP took over, anticipating a turn for the worse, whereas those leaving now have seen that transformation occur before their eyes, and it is what they’re escaping. Most of those who left prior to 1997 were not especially politically active themselves or even had particularly strong political views. They tended to be middle- to upper-class and most feared the effect of the Communist takeover on the business environment. They had enough money to have options.
After 1997, when they saw that the immediate and direct effect of the handover on the economy was actually negligible, many returned or at least kept one foot in each place, securing foreign passports for themselves and their families while conducting business in Hong Kong and China, where there was a lot more money to be made, and a lot faster, than in the more slowly growing economies to which they’d escaped.
By contrast, HK is a much much more politically conscious city than in the 1990s, and those leaving now are overwhelmingly “yellow.” They deplore the CCP crackdown. They don’t want their children to go to schools that are being transformed into authoritarian indoctrination centers. They come from a wider range of classes and ages than the typically middle-aged business emigrants of a few decades back. And they are taking their political views with them when they move abroad.
If trends continue, this will probably become the largest exodus from Hong Kong over an extended period. Whereas about 50,000 per year left in the 1987-1996 period, so far, over about two years, about 100,000 per year have left. That would mean about one million over a decade. Of course, it could very well be that the ones who really wanted to get out have already done so, and the numbers taper off over coming years.
You are an accountant. For many years, you have worked for a firm that makes its money from business in China. You’ve never liked your job really, but it’s remunerated you well, not only allowing you to raise a family but to buy several properties around the city. Without a doubt, your heart is pro-democracy—your wife even went out and protested, but you’ve never been particularly political; it’s not a big part of your identity. Still, you see clearly before you what the demise of a liberal society looks like, and you hate to see what they’ve done to your city. You want to get out, mostly for the good of your two kids, and get out soon enough that they can have most of their educated abroad, in a free society, with more opportunities, and no need for political subservience to get ahead. The UK’s the easiest route, the only one you’re considering, but you know you’ll never get a job there as well paid as what you have now. Not only that, but its economy is far from stellar. And it will take some time to extricate yourself financially from HK, especially with those properties. So do you jump, and if so, when? Don’t you want to maximize your earnings potential for a couple more years? But don’t wait too long, for the sake of your kids.
The decisions of people like this will determine the ultimate number of people who leave HK by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, change occurs at a dizzying rate, and not just in the CCP’s dismantling of the formerly liberal society.
In this archetypal way station of a city, proverbially living on borrowed time, what HKers were arguably doing in the 2019-2020 protests was staking a claim to HK as their home, attempting to make it a permanent place, to take ownership, through demands for real autonomy, full democracy, popular sovereignty, and full citizenship rather than subjection. They wanted to be their own government’s bosses, not its subalterns. People understood it was a last-ditch effort; they knew the CCP plan’s was to gradually swallow its colony whole, stripping it of even vestiges of autonomy and separate identity. HKers were saying, This is our home, not yours; we insist you stop encroaching on it.”
Unsurprisingly, what the CCP did was just the opposite, fully and unequivocally reneging on the most basic agreements and promises it had made, both formally in the Joint Sino-British Declaration and the Basic Law, and informally in its messaging to the rest of the world and the HK people.
Now many of those who asserted their claim to HK as their home, and along with that, all of the rights of popular sovereignty pertaining to such a claim, feel they have no option left but to leave their home. Those who had left China for HK in previous eras are now leaving HK for the rest of the world. What used to be a refuge is now becoming a place of fear and persecution from which to flee. In both cases, from China in previous eras, from HK today, the flight is from the same tyrant, the CCP, which does not see the exodus as reflecting badly on its rule but rather as an opportunity to flush its enemies out of the system. Since the handover in 1997, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have moved to HK, and the CCP stands poised to step up this colonial operation of population replacement.
As tens of thousands of HK people leave their home, they take their home with them and make somewhere else their home. In doing so, are they also making their new home Hong Kong? Is Hong Kong becoming less a place and more an identity, a community, at least for those involved in this transformation? To what extent is the exodus re-creation, as opposed to abandonment, of a home? And, who knows, perhaps a bridge to a future HK along the lines of what we have desired.
If Hong Kong, the geographical location, is now becoming little more than a colonial possession to be transformed in its ruler’s image, will those who go abroad as well as those who remain, in carrying that essence of Hong Kong within themselves, manage to preserve and renew it, so that it may one day flourish as the free, autonomous and fully democratic society that the majority of its citizens has so fervently desired? Or is that just a delusion, the scrap of hope at which one grasps to compensate for the lack of any prospect for positive resolution on the immediate horizon, indeed for the double death of both the HK we knew and of the hope for the HK to which we aspired? What does it mean to create a people, a community, a polity that spans the globe; can such a thing really occur? To what extent will or can the disapora become a repository for what can no longer exist in HK itself?