Thousands of civilians who escaped starvation and Mao’s repression are now forced to emigrate from the former colony due to the loss of freedoms
Between 1950 and the late 1970s, his ancestors fled to British Hong Kong to escape famine and repression in communist China. Like a macabre joke of fate, time has finally caught them in capitalist Hong Kong, which brought the United Kingdom back to Beijing twenty-five years ago. They no longer try to wriggle out of hunger; “alone” by the increasing repression imposed by the Chinese regime on the former colony of London. But history repeats itself and the effect is the same: run away with your bags on your back.
After two generations in freedom, that is the future that awaits Bill, a young man who hides under this fictitious name to protect his family. Born in Hong Kong thirty years ago, before moving to China on July 1, 1997, he will have to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps in order not to end up like his great-grandfather. “Long before communist China, my great-grandfather had passed Imperial College exams and was a school teacher, but he was purged in the Anti-Rightist Movement in the late 1950s and sent to a ‘laogai’ (labour camp) for re-education.) , where he was for over twenty years,” Bill tells this newspaper via video call.
While his great-grandfather was rotting in the Gulag, Bill’s grandfather was unable to study and barely survived farming in Canton Province (Guangdong), bordering Hong Kong. “In 1962, after the Great Famine that claimed millions of lives, my grandfather, at the age of 20, crossed the border into Hong Kong in a small boat. My grandmother, who was only 16 years old, walked for three days from Dongguan to jump the fence that was smeared with tiger feces, which people smeared on their bodies to scare the soldiers’ dogs and not shoot them.” says Bill. told him as a child.
According to author Chen Bingan, who documented these escapes with 100 interviews in the book “The Great Escape to Hong Kong,” some two million people fled China in those three decades. While there are still many classified documents due to the sensitivity of the issue, the official Chinese media reduces the number to 560,000 refugees and Hong Kong’s to about 700,000. Regardless of what’s right, any amount reduces pimples near the Berlin Wall or the North Korean border.
“My grandfather earned a living as a shoemaker, watchman and sailor, while my grandmother was employed as a maid. By working very hard, they raised their five children and gave my father a university degree,” Bill tells a success story that is common in Hong Kong. In fact, much of the economic ‘boom’ in the 1970s and 1980s was due to these refugees. They became entrepreneurs, many of them learned from such experience and later returned to mainland China, where Deng Xiaoping’s reforms after Mao’s death first opened the neighboring fishing village of Shenzhen, which soon became one of the engines of became the ‘global factory’.
“Like most Hong Kongers at the time, my parents didn’t care about politics or democracy, just about making money and living a good life. Coming from China, which was much open and growing at the time, they were happy with the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, as the Basic Law guaranteed Hong Kong’s autonomy with the principle of ‘one country, two systems’, valid in theory until 2047 », Bill analyzes.
When Beijing attempted to impose the National Security Law in 2003, a demonstration of more than half a million people forced the withdrawal of then-leaders, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, to the shadows, who wanted no trouble because they were focused on continuing promote economic growth. For Bill, there was a “honeymoon” with China between 1997 and 2012, with “the greatest sense of national pride at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”
But between 2012 and 2013, there were regime changes and, to paraphrase Vargas Llosa, with the coming to power of Xi Jinping “Peru was screwed”. “It all started in 2012 with the National Education Act, which students protested for being brainwashing, and continued in 2014 with the Umbrella Rebellion over the unfulfilled promise of universal suffrage. From that moment on, people started thinking about politics and the future,” explains Bill about the genesis of the democratic movement that led to the massive and violent protests of 2019.
Deactivated by the coronavirus pandemic and Beijing’s 2020 National Security Law criminalizing any political opposition, these demonstrations brought together hundreds of thousands of middle-aged youth and families in their latest attempt at democracy. Failed and with most Democratic politicians in jail, the millions of Billies in Hong Kong, raised in the liberal values the British left behind, have no other path than their grandparents’ own: exile.
“We have the feeling that Hong Kong is living on borrowed time and will be like Shanghai after the communist triumph in 1949, when many of its inhabitants fled the city,” the young man recalls bitterly. His plan is to emigrate to the UK with his family because they hold the passport of British citizens abroad, issued before the return in 1997. By granting the right to live, work and study in the UK for five years , you can apply for British citizenship up to the sixth year and is a lifeline for 4.7 of the 7.5 million Hong Kongers.
Since 2019, when the uprising for democracy erupted, more than 540,000 people have applied and 123,400 have applied for UK citizenship, which was granted in 92% of cases.
One of them is activist Fermi Wong, who emigrated to Hong Kong in 1980 at the age of ten, following her father’s lead. “There I discovered that there was freedom to say what people thought without fear, not like in China, where they taught us that Mao was like a god, and my mother and grandmother had to get into bed and cover themselves with a duvet to talking to hidden for a secret,” he explains via video call from the UK. Known for her relevance in the Democratic movement, she went into exile there in November 2020, fleeing the national security law, which imprisoned many of her friends and colleagues, such as Benny Tai or Joshua Wong.
Like many other Hong Kongers, Fermi Wong has been sentenced to double exile. “The first time I didn’t feel like a refugee. But my mother told me that if we hadn’t left China, I would have ended up in jail. In Hong Kong I was very happy and I had no fear. That’s why I didn’t want to leave; they forced me to do it. Now I consider myself a refugee,” she confesses with tears in her eyes.
To help exiles, other activists such as Simon Cheng and Julian Chan founded the NGO Hongkongers in Britain in July 2020. “Many more are to come in the coming months as Hong Kong’s new chief executive, former police officer John Lee, will continue to crack down,” predicts Julian Chan, who mainly “expects “young people and families who don’t want their children growing up.” without freedom”. In this eternal return of borrowed time, the grandchildren will have to emigrate like their grandparents did to escape Chinese communism.
Source: La Verdad
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