OH, NOT TO BE IN ENGLAND

Simon Winchester discovers

that the Hong Kong Chinese would rather not come here after all

Hong Kong A FEW minutes before ten each evening, a shiny white jumbo jet of Singapore Air- lines lumbers, fully-laden, from the single runway of Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong for the 12-hour crossing of the Pacific, bound for San Francisco. I had the rare good fortune of taking this service, known as SQ Two, last Saturday night and, though the brain managed to erase most memories of the experience, two aspects of the crossing remain firmly in my mind.

The first was the cost. Cathay Pacific Airways, which is based in the colony but largely owned by the dynasts of the Swire family, charges £1,150 for one to travel, steerage, between the two points and back again. Singapore Airlines, which critics say offers marginally more courteous service and less rubbery fowls, charges £480 for the same return journey. No one can properly explain the huge difference, other than by the assumption that the greedy old Swires have a pressing need to repair the roofs of a few of their castles, and are collecting as much cash from the colonials as they can while the going is good.

Whatever the reason, the effect is plain

to see. While it is perfectly simple to get aboard a Cathay trans-Pacific jet any day of the week, Singapore Airlines planes are always full. Having squeezed on only thanks to persistence, and to having called in an old favour, I noticed that the plane was filled with Hong Kong Chinese who are emigrating to the United States.

The signs of exodus were all there at check-in: the queues were filled with whole families of Cantonese, two and three and sometimes four generations of them, all chattering away nineteen to the dozen, weeping, and being charged small fortunes in excess baggage for having come along with scores of oddly-shaped suitcases and gunny sack, and those red, white and blue plastic valises that all the local amahs carry, and which are thus known in these parts as Manila Vuitton. And if it wasn't clear what was going on at the Hong Kong end, then it was at the other end. For the San Francisco immigration authorities di- vide oncoming wave of passengers into three: Americans (including my wife) to a fast-moving path on the left of the hallway; visitors (like me) in a crawling mass at the centre; and first-time emigrants in an almost static tumble of huddled masses yearning to break free, but in this case corralled over onto the far right. Last Saturday night, as apparently on every single night, the queue at the right, that of Hong Kong immigrants to America, was twice the size of any other; Singapore Airlines Flight SQ Two is clearly the getaway special, a visible display of the ever-increasing jitteriness of a colony on the edge.

These Bay-bound emigrants — and most of the other hundred-odd that statistics tell us were leaving that same night and every night on flights to Vancouver and Sydney and Brisbane and Los Angeles (for more than 1,200 are now leaving each week, 60,000 a year) — had evidently put the past behind them. They had put their names down on consulates' lists; they had filled in forms; they had applied for their Certifi- cates of No Criminal Conviction from the local police; they had been alternately cheered or dismayed to hear that their various professions had been deemed necessary or superfluous by the countries to which they had applied; and after nail-biting intervals of many months and sometimes many years, they had been given their permissions to go, and had gone, quickly and with barely a backward glance, before the portcullis had a chance to rattle down again.

What, to a man, they had not done, however, was to have ignored the blandish- ments of Washington and Ottawa and Canberra — capitals that say they actually want immigrants, and are eager for their skills and their personalities — and to have listened instead to a siren-call from Lon- don and completed a 32-page salmon-pink form BN(HK)1, by which it is has been recently possible to lodge formal applica- tion for something splendidly titled the Governor's Recommendation for Registra- tion as a British Citizen.

They had neither done this, nor had they read the eight pages of Guidance Notes for the Completion of Form BN(HK)1, nor had they attended to the details laid out in the 28-page General Guide to the scheme, nor had they handed over 20 Hong Kong dollars for any one of the nine reference manuals, such as the 250-page Manual No. 1 for Business and Management Appli- cants, which would perhaps help them still further.

Those on last week's jumbo jet had not done any of these things — had in effect spurned Her Majesty's offer of a new home — because, in their particular cases, they were already fixed up and thus had no need of so splendid-sounding an award as a Governor's Recommendation for British Citizenship. But the dismaying revelation of more recent date is that barely any of their successors, barely any significant fraction of those thousands of panicky put it to you that your remark amounted to racial discrimination.' Hong Kongers who are still short of some respectably bankable citizenship, have fil- led in Form BN (HK)1 either.

One million of these forms and almost as many notes, guides and manuals had been printed; but it turned out that, when the deadline came at the end of February, 65,674 people had applied and responded to all the pages of rubrics — and 934,326 virgin forms, amounting to just short of 30 million sheets of salmon-pink paper and a small clump of virgin forest, went entirely to waste.

Why? everyone here is now asking. Her Majesty's ministers in particular are pro- fessing themselves perplexed. Their public view is that they had worried themselves sick over Tienanmen Square and its after- math, had cared, and still do care deeply for the people of Hong Kong and for the colony's fortunes, and, despite the known domestic political risks of inviting over a quarter of a million Cantonese who are not exactly renowned for mingling with the British natives in England, had decided to contrive this complex and sensitively consi- dered apparatus of a Governor's Recom- mendation Scheme. They had done all this and yet, to their corporate astonishment, almost all of Hong Kong turned its back on it.

What could the matter be? Why had these ungrateful colonials not at least applied for the right to come to Britain?

Was it something we said? Was it the weather? The food? Or was it perhaps the cynically and quite unjustly held suspicion that the scheme was not, perhaps, all that it was supposed to be?

Immigration lawyers, of whom there are no small number in this town today, made money out of interpreting the forms to those few who bothered to fill them in. They especially advised on the worth (in points, a number of which — up to a maximum of 800 — had to be accrued to qualify for the supposedly sought-after Recommendation) of such arcana as the applicant having worked for the Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem (35 points), of his voluntary service with the Noel Croucher English Studies Scholarship Committee (50 points), or his being 59 years old (minus 180 points). They helped bewildered appli- cants to decide under which category they might possibly apply — Physical Distribu- tion Manager, perhaps, or Sample Co- ordinator, or any of the 2,000 or so 'core' tasks that Whitehall had identified as being likely to be worthy to suggest to Sir David Wilson, the Colonial Governor, the need for a Recommendation for British Citizenship. And they helped their clients to write their names properly in Chinese Commercial Code, the 24-digit monsters — more numbers than there are Chinese — that help computers to enumerate and classify and properly divide the Wongs from the Wangs and the Chius from the Chows. But, said these lawyers, they made such money as they did from precious few people. The forms were too complicated, they explained. The Tienanmen panic was over, they opined. The Chinese like to leave matters of such gravity to the very last minute, they added — and this scheme was contrived and completed much too early. And there was an implication (en- tirely wrongly understood, the Govern- ment insists) that by applying for this British Scheme one would be barred from applying for any other. Opt for Britain, went this fear — and lose out on Canada.

Perhaps most serious of all was the revelation that the organisation of the whole affair was conducted not by the relatively benign and disinterested bureaucrats of the British Home Office, as had been promised, but by the steely-eyed men of the Hong Kong Immigration De- partment, who are feared and loathed by turn, and whose motives and whose com- puters (which are said to be linked to all other government departments here) are mistrusted by all.

Taken cumulatively, these reasons may help to account for some of the massive lack of interest in a scheme that had once seemed to be of such tremendous symbolic importance, and which had prompted so lively an internal debate in Britain. But the immigration lawyers of Hong Kong suspect that another factor played a part — prob- ably the greatest part: a deep distrust among the fleeing Chinese of the future and the stability and the profitability of Britain herself. Why leave a sinking ship, they say, for another in equally rotten condition? Why not wait, given that there's still a little time, for a ship — or a plane with rather more promise, with far better prospects of eventually better times?

Singapore Airlines say that they plan to keep their highly profitable Flight SQ Two flying eastbound every night for the fore- seeable future, and that the fare will probably remain at £500 or thereabouts, and that perhaps the clerks at the desk will take in future a more sympathetic view towards charging excess on the tons of Manila Vuitton that any one emigrant can take along with him. That being so — and that being similarly so on the nightly Qantas flight to Sydney and the Air Cana- da ditto to Vancouver — one can predict with some confidence the continuing direc- tion of Hong Kong's seemingly endless exodus. One can be sure, too, given the anaesthetic effect of BN (HK)1 and its guides, manuals and notes, that Cathay Pacific's non-stop nightly service to Lon- don will remain for the coming years relatively free of would-be immigrants, and largely the preserve instead of pin-striped white barbarians — men and women flying between two cities that will be linked only by their similarly dismal prospects, and thus unloved, unwanted and unsettled by most of those Chinese who have a watch on the future, and an eye on the main chance.