Thousands of citizens who escaped hunger 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 starvation and repression in communist China. Like a macabre joke of fate, time has ended up trapping them in capitalist Hong Kong, which the United Kingdom returned to Beijing twenty-five years ago. They no longer try to wriggle out of hunger; “only” from the increasing repression that the Chinese regime is imposing 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 so as not to end up like his great-grandfather. “Long before Communist China, my great-grandfather had passed the Imperial College exam and was a school teacher, but he was purged in the Anti-Rightist Movement in the late 1950s and sent for re-education to a ‘laogai’ (labor camp), where he was more than twenty years, “Bill tells this newspaper by video call.
While his great-grandfather was rotting in the gulag, Bill’s grandfather was unable to study and barely survived by farming in the province of Canton (Guangdong), bordering Hong Kong. “In 1962, after the Great Famine that claimed millions of lives, my grandfather crossed the border to Hong Kong in a small boat at the age of 20. My grandmother, who was only 16 years old, walked three days from Dongguan to jump the fence smeared with tiger droppings, which people smeared on their bodies to scare away the soldiers’ dogs and not shoot them, “says Bill. the family memories they told him as a child.
According to the writer Chen Bingan, who documented these escapes with a hundred interviews in the book ‘The Great Escape to Hong Kong’, some two million people fled China during those three decades. . Although there are still many secret documents due to the sensitivity of the issue, the official Chinese media lower the figure to 560,000 refugees and those of Hong Kong place it at around 700,000. Regardless of which is correct, any amount dwarfs breakouts at the Berlin Wall or the North Korean border.
economic boom
“My grandfather made a living as a shoemaker, watchman and sailor while my grandmother was placed as a housemaid. By working very hard, they raised their five children and gave my father a university degree”, tells Bill a success story that is common in Hong Kong. In fact, much of its economic ‘boom’ during the 1970s and 1980s was due to these refugees. Turned into entrepreneurs, many of them learned from such an 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 the “ global factory.
“Like most Hongkongers back then, my parents didn’t care about politics or democracy, just making money and having a good life. As they came from China, which was opening up and growing a lot at the time, they were happy about the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, since the Basic Law guaranteed Hong Kong’s autonomy with the principle of ‘one country, two systems’, valid in theory until 2047 », analyzes Bill.
When Beijing tried to impose the National Security Law in 2003, a demonstration with more than half a million people forced the withdrawal of the then leaders, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin in the shadows, who did not want problems because they were focused on continuing to promote economic growth. For Bill, between 1997 and 2012 there was a “honeymoon” with China, with “the greatest feeling of national pride during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”
But between 2012 and 2013 there were changes in the regime and, to paraphrase Vargas Llosa, with the rise to power of Xi Jinping “Peru was screwed”. “It all started in 2012 with the National Education Law, against which students protested because it was brainwashing, and continued in 2014 with the Umbrella Revolt over the unfulfilled promise of universal suffrage. From that moment on, people began to think about politics and the future,” explains Bill the genesis of the democratic movement that led to the massive and violent protests of 2019.
Deactivated by the coronavirus pandemic and the National Security Law imposed in 2020 by Beijing, which criminalizes any political opposition, these demonstrations brought together hundreds of thousands of young people and middle-aged families in their last push for democracy. Failed and with most of the Democratic politicians in jail, the millions of Billies in Hong Kong, educated in the liberal values left behind by the British, have no other path than the one followed by their grandparents: 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 reflects bitterly. His plan is to emigrate with his family to the United Kingdom because they have the passport of British nationals abroad, granted before the return in 1997. Granting the right to live, work and study in the United Kingdom for five years, it allows you to apply for citizenship British to the sixth year and is a lifeline for 4.7 of the 7.5 million Hong Kongers.
Since 2019, when the revolt for democracy broke out, more than 540,000 people have applied and 123,400 have applied for British citizenship, granted in 92% of cases.
Covered by a duvet
One of them is the activist Fermi Wong, who in 1980 emigrated to Hong Kong at the age of ten following her father. «There I discovered that there was freedom to say what one thought without fear, not like in China, where they had 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 talk to hidden from some secret, ”he explains by video call from the United Kingdom. She pointed out her relevance in the democratic movement, she went into exile there in November 2020 fleeing the National Security Law, for which many of her friends and colleagues have been imprisoned, such as Benny Tai or Joshua Wong .
Like many other Hong Kongers, Fermi Wong is condemned to a 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 had no fear. That’s why I didn’t want to leave; they forced me to do it. Now I do 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 will come in the coming months because the new chief executive of Hong Kong, the former policeman John Lee, will continue with a heavy hand,” predicts Julian Chan, who expects above all “young people and families who do not want their children to grow up without freedom”. In this eternal return of borrowed time, the grandchildren will have to emigrate like their grandparents did to escape Chinese communism.
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