Leo Goodstadt, Regina Connolly and Frank Bannister
and refugees had swollen the population from 600,000 in 1945 to 1.8 million in 1948 2. The 1949 Immigrants Control Ordinance made it a criminal offence to enter Hong Kong without official approval. This law proved ineffectual because it was physically impossible to seal off the land and sea boundaries of the colony. The principal incentive to comply with the new immigration and registration legislation was removed when the government’ s 1950 pledge to supply the community with rice was abandoned and registration of adult immigrants for ration cards was suspended the following year 3.
A halt to mass immigration from the mainland required the cooperation of the Chinese authorities. Social controls tightened on the mainland as Maoism became more radical from 1958. Beijing now had an ideological incentive for sealing off the Chinese side of the border from Hong Kong and its capitalism and colonialism which outweighed its previous insistence that since Hong Kong was de jure sovereign Chinese territory, Chinese citizens ought to be able to enter and leave without hindrance.
The retreat from Maoism in 1978 saw a relaxation of the Mainland’ s tight controls on movement in the border area with Hong Kong and illegal immigration increased significantly. The post‐Mao Chinese leadership was ready to overlook the sovereignty issue involved in allowing the British authorities to‘ deport’ Chinese citizens who had entered the territory in defiance of colonial legislation. The colonial administration was able to persuade the Chinese government to cooperate in the repatriation of persons who entered Hong Kong illegally 4. At this point, the identity card became a powerful weapon in Hong Kong because persons without this document could be arrested and immediately deported to their places of origin on the mainland.
This cooperation was to prove the first step towards solving a problem of great importance to Hong Kong’ s future: the creation of a legal identity for Hong Kong residents when they faced two competing sovereignties. Under British law, anyone born in the colony obtained some form of British nationality automatically which was then automatically transmitted to their children and grandchildren( wherever born). Under Chinese law, any child of a Chinese citizen born in Hong Kong was regarded as a Chinese citizen without dual nationality. Much the same sort of ambivalence about national status had existed in Malaya and Singapore under British rule. As the latter territories had progressed to home rule and subsequently to independence, they had to define who was entitled to reside in their separate territories and what their legal identity would be. The identity card system had made a workable solution easier to achieve.
In retrospect, Hong Kong’ s consequent tougher identity cards measures of 1980 can be seen as having started the process of defining what would be the qualifications for permanent residence and separate nationalities in the post‐1997 SAR. The Chinese government was to adopt much the same formula as the British had done in Malaya and Singapore based on similar compromises between alien permanent residents and national citizens for post‐1997 Hong Kong. The exception was the severe restrictions on the right of entry that were to be imposed on Chinese citizens who did not qualify for a Hong Kong identity card. This restriction was acceptable to Beijing, not because Hong Kong was in a separate category but because control of internal migration was not regarded as a sovereignty issue and, in any case, was a long‐standing feature of mainland life.
By the start of the 21 st century, the identity card had an even more dramatic contribution to make. The rising flood of immigrants has caused no inconvenience at border crossings. The practical benefits of this situation are enormous. The total number of tourists, for example, trebled over this decade, but the Mainland numbers rose by well over six times, accounting for 57 percent of total tourists. As, under the Chinese Basic Law enacted to deal with the 1997 reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, Hong Kong’ s people have a separate identity from the rest of the Chinese nation, the identity card plays a key role. There was a good reason for the approach adopted by the Chinese government. As a matter of sovereignty, China could not create a separate citizenship for Hong Kong people. Pre 1997, most Hong Kong families had acquired, either by birth or through application, a foreign nationality( Blake 1982). If this group had been deprived of a Hong Kong identity post‐ 1997, the loss of educated and affluent members of the community through emigration would have been even higher than it was( see below) and the door would have been closed to their return after 1997 even though the Chinese government’ s commitment to the maintenance of Hong Kong’ s way of life was being honoured( Lee 1997; Lee and DeGoyler 1997). The Chinese government therefore showed considerable ingenuity in 2
Demographic data for these years were subject to considerable margins of error. 3 R. R. Todd, Colonial Secretary, Hong Kong Hansard, 29th March, 1950, p. 119; Hong Kong Annual Report of the Director of Supplies, Trade and Industry for the Period 1 st April, 1948 to 31 st March, 1949( Hong Kong: n. p., n. d.), p. 1; 4 Hong Kong 1981, A Review of 1980( Hong Kong: Government Printer, 1981), pp. 145‐6.
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