Stuart Wolfendale

As small contribution to the 10^th Anniversary of the Handover, I reproduce here the text of a broadcast I made just before it, on RTHK, in February 1997.

“Back to the Nationality Supermarket”

Apart from a brief visit, last Spring, I have been away from Hong Kong for over a year. Nearly everybody I have first spoken to since coming back a month ago, has asked me approximately the same question. “What changes can you see?’

It is not in my nature to disappoint. I have ransacked my memory of street scenes over the previous days. I have tried to remember something said or read that took me aback. I have felt my professional reputation as an observer under quiet attack. Yet still I have had to come up with the same frank answer. “I have not seen any real changes at all”.

Life in Hong Kong goes on at that same pace, a pace which foreigners with high blood pressure should drop out of and take a plane. On the Mass Transit Railway, mothers still thrust their children through the doors as batterings rams in order to grab a seat.

Mini bus drivers still move along at hysterical speeds in third gear. Bus drivers on bends are still trying to find the vehicles precise centre of gravity.

Young bloods out of karaoke bars are still finding themselves and their mates in spectacular manglings of motor car metal at three o’ clock in the morning when they have forgotten that one of the tunnels is closed for maintenance and the one they are in is two‑way

In lower Ice House Street, they are ripping up one perfectly good pavement to replace it with another, designed as an ice cream ripple. Connaught Road Central is in exactly the same state of excavation and mayhem that it has been in every day for the last twenty years.

Near to where I last lived, on Queen’s Road East in Wanchai, entire blocks of pre-war apartment buildings with interesting features have been removed . One charming little road, Monmouth Path, the one spot where a few moments patience would get you a taxi in the darkest of hours is now a trench and closed. If I had lived in the neighbourhood still, I would never have been able to get out of it..

This is not change. By Hong Kong’s standards of urban self destruction, this is continuity. The racket around it which goes on all day and now by force majeur into the night is the sound of stability.

In the political arena, petulance remains at the fore. Amidst milk, honey and plenty, senior Chinese officials suddenly make remarks which suggest that methane Maoism will be in place by the second week of July. This time it was a promise to revise history text books. The Governor continues to make dry wry remarks with the barely sub textual suggestion that senior Chinese cadres should be seeing an analyst.

The provisional legislature decides to pass amendments which stiffen up existing rubber truncheon ordinances before that body has even crossed the border and the Hong Kong Government slaps five per cent on a bottle of Scotch. I don’t care about the increased personal allowances on personal tax. Anyone with a half conscious accountant doesn’t pay any anyway. But how can you avoid five per cent on a bottle at a supermarket check out?

So Hong Kong priorities return to this Prodigal Son as fast as he returns to Hong Kong.

I was delighted to see that the Vietnamese are still with us. After twenty years, what will the media do when they have gone? Even with so few of them left here, there presence amongst the populace remains just as inflammatory. It was interesting to see the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have a so‑called letter almost rammed down her throat on the pavement the other night by a group of neo racists on the interesting presumption that somehow she owed them in person, 100 million dollars for having so diligently looked after these ratbag refugees.

The world of crime has not changed, I am glad to say. Dozens of young men still gather on distant rancid playgrounds for settlement talks carrying metal bars. People are still inexplicably lured to brutal deaths in stone huts.

“Shall we leave the comfort of this bar and go for a meaningless drive to a stone hut?”

“Thank you, I don’t mind if I do.”

The police continue shoot outs with wanted villains armed now more thoroughly than Hezbollah’s warriors of Allah. Judges breathe flames of righteous wrath across the bench and pass down sentences that carry the accused into the next millennium, and past any reasonable expectation of my own lifespan.

Joggers are still finding decomposing murder victims in country parks and dogs are still finding chicken wings to doggy heaven on Bowen Road. I believe that the dog poisonings are the fiendishly coordinated works of a Masonic grouping of local residents who, fed up with being jogged over and indecently exposed to at nights‑ which they can’t do much about ‑ decided to take terrorist action when they were doggie pooped and peed upon.

I must admit that there is one area of Hong Kong in which there has been not so much a change as a marked intensification. Hong Kong has become a nationality supermarket. It is a supermarket before a typhoon. Shoppers are racing up and down the aisles making grabs from the shelves ‑ a box of BNOs, a last minute tin of Australian, the difficult to reach jars of American with a Lucky Draw offer on the side, a pot of British Old Original ‑ but you need coupons‑ or there is the Chinese special offer Singapore microwave or, if you are really short, a priced to clear pack of Honduran from the minced meats section.

In the last three weeks I have heard of young Indians who have surrendered their Indian passports in the hope of becoming stateless and then, abracadabra! full British citiziens. I have listened to British belongers who were scared of going away for the Easter weekend in case, when they got back, they needed a work visa. I talked to a British Nationality Scheme passport holder who wondered if he would be let in to the U.K as a refugee.

First I turned my attention to the British nationality Overseas Passport of which there are some 2 and a half million out there.

This week, I attended a briefing by the Senior British Trade Commissioner, Mr Francis Cornish who is a Foreign Office official of ambassador level. He occupies a building opposite the Conrad. It tries to blend in with the opulent forced cheer of its neighbours but it is about to become the British Consulate General to the SAR so it is difficult to altogether camouflage its contemporary fortress style.

Mr Cornish and his successor will be running one of the ten biggest British overseas missions in the world and he wanted to tell us about how, now, they have taken over all British nationality functions from the Immigration Department. In November it was visas.

In June it was UK passports and now it is the final issue of British National Overseas passports.

There have been ten phases of issue since 1993. Each has been according to age group. Each has had a deadline and every time thousands of applicants have come in well over it with ’special circumstances’ excuses like ‘been on holiday’ or ‘ working nights’. These are men and women after my own heart and the Immigration department, to its credit turned barely any one of them away.

The final deadline is 31 March ‑ except for the new born and those yet to be born up to 30 June who get till the 30th September to toddle to a counter in The Consulate. This gives the last chance adults fifteen days to get the Foreign Office in Trade Commission clothing. Mr Cornish is a reasonable man but not one to elaborate on his ’special circumstances’. He could only come up with ’serious illness’.

The Immigration Department, whatever else you might call it , is an organisation which operates in the tall grasses of the common man. The Foreign Office does not really. It will likely want the decks as clean as possible by 30 June. Somehow I feel that circumstances like ‘visiting relatives’ or ‘ working overtime’ will not wash quite so readily at The Consulate ‑to ‑be.

Mr Cornish and his colleagues have to have their tongues quite close to the walls of their cheeks when they speak of the BNO as a ‘British Nationality’. They are loyal civil servants. These are terms that ministers prescribe for them to say. In fact the BNO can be described as a clockwork toy. Wind it up and it is a travel document which allows visa access to 83 countries, not one of which you can call your own. After a generation, it runs down to a stop. Most of its holders here are Chinese and they will inevitably be subsumed into the documentation of the People’s Republic.

Those who ignore the whole BNO production number and are not eligible for a Chinese document will receive yet another category of British nationality called British Overseas citizenship. Britain’s straggling colonies have caused it to come up with almost as many categories of citizenship as Campbells soups have flavours. United Kingdom citizenship is the thick oxtail. The BNO is cream of chicken. The BOC must be clear consomme. Not only have you nowhere to call your own, there are very much fewer places that will even let you in for a fortnight. It is an ideal document for people who can afford to spend their time permanently in airplanes.

The shallow draught of the BNO is revealed when the owner is not of Chinese race. It was the disastrous prospects for Indian and Pakistani ethnics who had it and nothing else that finally jemmied British citizenship out of the British Government.

The sudden volte face of the British government was clearly decided on in a room in London full of political smoke. The Labour Party had already said it would grant the passports. There was nothing for it but for the Home Secretary and the Tory hardliners to cave in front of an election. It is a peripheral matter to them, rather like polishing the coach lamp at the door when the house behind it has burned down. Doomed Governments do this sort of thing.

The suddenness and the vagueness of the February 4 announcement prompted the less savvy amongst the non Chinese community to follow a clamour to ditch their existing real country passports. The Indian Commissioner counselled caution. The local Indian Resources group said they would only back those who faced genuine statelessness. The British government was not about to be outmanouvered. A 14 February statement from them said that only persons who were genuinely British before the 4 February announcement would be considered.

It was naive to think that the British Government, seasoned by decades of immigration from the sub Continent, would be hoodwinked into letting the last days of Hong Kong be a last back door to citizens of India and Pakistan.

The royal assent to these citizienships is being given about now. A team of ten men from the Home Office is on its way to process applications but it seems that holders of non British documents who ditched them to look stateless are also look as though they are scuppered.

Light relief over the last few weeks has been the panicking British belongers, those who have put in seven years or more and who are having their exclusive right to land status slightly downgraded to that of unconditional stayers to the glee of other long staying expatriates who have never had anything else.

It always goes against the grain to see rights taken away but decolonisation has always been a bit of a bitch where that is concerned and, as Francis Cornish said, ‘on the 1 July the British community will be a foreign community. More immediately worrying to the long time Brits has been this Government’s pre June house keeping exercise which says ‑should Legco pass it‑ that work permits will continue not to be required of those who are in Hong Kong immediately up to and including 1st April.

Clouds have hung naggingly over Easter weekends of mischief in Manila, bonks in Bangkok and the sunning of paunches in Penang. The fear has been that to go away before the first and to come back afterwards would mean applying for a work permit before you could back to the office. Expatriate British police officers taking a break or not of seven years residence were particularly bemused at the prospect of getting back into uniform after that weekend and being approached by a colleague who had worked through it.

“Chris, look I’m sorry mate but you are working without a permit. You’re knicked.”

I have the hint of good news for those seven year Brits who won’t be proving themselves here on that day. Sources inside the Government say that the intention is that should they return to Hong Kong within the year and plight their troth to her again for a whole year, the work permit requirement will disappear. Let’s see. Test cases are already limbering up.

Of course we could put all this at the door of the Chinese Government which defines nationality by race rather than by territory. No matter how long you have lived inside, if you are not Chinese, you don’t cut it. In Hong Kong , this seems a bit stringent. After all, in Hong Kong the peripheral four percent of non Chinese are hardly likely to out breed the indigenees. Still, in Asia , China is not alone in this. Nationalism is a universal narcotic. Perhaps we should heed what the historian Michael Howard says and accept it.

“Societies” he observes ” are held together not by abstract rational principles or convenient administrative arrangements but by deeply held habits of consensus and belief.”

Perhaps the most dramatic nationality case I have come across in these weeks was in a taxi and I actively encouraged an administrative arrangement.

The driver , a Hong Kong Chinese of course, asked me if I was British. I confessed.

‘I am British too. The Nationality Scheme.”

“Good show” I said trying to sound tribal.

“Tell me,” he asked. “If you go back there broke and with nowhere to live will they turn you away?’

My back stiffened. “Absolutely not. I am British . They have to let me in and take care of me.”

“Will they do that for me. My two boys are at school there. I do not want to stay here. I want to be there.”

Well, I told him that we as Brits were now identical and that as long as he did not expect broad smiles from the immigration people at Heathrow he would walk into Britain. “Go , ” I told him. “Take up your rights, emergency housing and a social services allowance.”

It was satisfying to have such a helpful impact on a stranger’s life and make something positive out of the molasses of nationality laws. I also thought that it would give the new and inevitably Labour Secretary of State for Health and Social Services something small but useful to do.

ENDS

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