Emily Lau’s accusation of Britain being ‘treacherous and dishonourable’ is unfair and insensitive (Joseph Long)
Writing in The Times on June 3, Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, opened the path to what he called one of the ‘biggest changes’ to the British visa system and confirmed that if China passed the new national security law, Britain would allow nearly three million Hong Kong citizens who hold British National (Overseas) passports to come to work and study for twelve months without a visa for extendable periods of twelve months.
Meanwhile, it looks as though Emily Lau, the prominent pro-democracy activist of Hong Kong and former lawmaker, was not happy at all with the well-intentioned offer and criticized the British government for not going the full Monty, thus relinquishing its duty to the people of Hong Kong. In her letter to The Times on June 4, she contended that Johnson’s proposal ‘gives little assurance’ and accused the British government of being ‘treacherous and dishonorable’ unless it offers right of abode to all Hong Kong citizens.
In fact, granting rights for Hong Kong BN(O) status holders to work and study in Britain for extendable twelve-month periods means that those who wish to take up the offer will have to physically go to Britain and stay there for five years before being eligible to apply for full citizenship. The proposal will screen out and prevent those who have no intention whatsoever to go, and those who are reluctant to demonstrate their willingness to establish their lives in Britain through taking physical actions from benefiting from this generous offer. Surely it would not be right to grant British citizenship automatically and unconditionally to all BN(O) holders, given that many of them are supporters of Beijing and, especially so, Hong Kong Police officers, whose brutality and callousness have been extensively reported and documented.
Whilst Emily Lau was absolutely right in saying in 1984 that it was not morally defensible for Britain to hand over five million Hong Kong people into the hands of a communist dictatorship, one has got to realize that the option that was presented in front of Margaret Thatcher over Hong Kong was in fact a Hobson’s choice between complying and destruction. It was later revealed in Thatcher’s memoir that Deng Xiao-ping, the then paramount leader of the People’s Republic, threatened he could seize Hong Kong in a day by force if he wanted to. The handover of Hong Kong, whether one likes it or not, has never been an issue of morality but one of inevitability(or, as Chris Patten famously put it, an ‘unshakeable destiny’), given the unfortunate fact that there is a leviathanic bully living next door who does not seem to have either the quality of tolerance or honorability in abundance.
The fact that Britain was somehow forced to make the decision in 1984 to hand over Hong Kong to China, however, does not relieve her of the responsibility to the people of Hong Kong, not least because Britain is a signatory to the Sino-British Joint Declaration—which as such imposes a legal obligation upon Britain to ensure Hong Kong’s way of life will remain until 2047, and the fact that the British government, despite the duress, did not consult the people of Hong Kong, in one way or another, when it went into negotiations with China and decided unilaterally that Hong Kong should be handed to China along with its five million subjects of Her Majesty the Queen. If the people of Hong Kong had been given a vote on the handover arrangement and they had voted in favor of it, then it would have allowed Britain to wash her hands of the deal—together with its obligation to either enforce the agreement or otherwise provide protection to the citizens of Hong Kong beyond 1997.
It is self-evident that the promulgation (not legislation) of the proposed national security law in Hong Kong will irretrievably damage the civil liberties and the way of life that Hongkongers have hitherto enjoyed. It is therefore only fair that Britain should offer refuge to those people of Hong Kong who wish to leave and maintain their way of life—the right to which was enshrined in the Joint Declaration—elsewhere.
Given that under Section 4 of the British Nationality Act 1981, British National (Overseas) status holders are entitled to register as British citizens after residing in Britain for five years, Boris Johnson’s proposal is clever in the sense that, as a policy, it allows the British government to circumvent both the necessity to get a new bill before the Commons and the statute with regards to the concept of right of abode as set down in the Immigration Act 1971. Emily Lau was wrong in assuming in her letter to The Times that the British government could simply grant right of abode to BN(O)s through a straightforward directive without conferring full citizenship, or that Britain could make legal provision for registering all BN(O) status holders as British citizens overnight. It is not only unfair on Emily Lau’s part to accuse Britain of being ‘treacherous and dishonorable’ for not granting right of abode to all Hong Kong citizens, but also legally illiterate and politically insensitive. The latter is particularly true when one considers the fact that she wrote it in a letter to one of Britain’s most-circulated newspapers, and that being a prominent figure in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movements, she is widely considered, if internationally, as representative of many of the pro-democracy activists in the territory.
(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong. He is a Philosophy graduate of King’s College London and has been a member of the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom since February 2020.)
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