UK opens door to citizenship for 300k HK residents
ft.com
ft.com
Seems like there's tons of editorial fillers around generalities and posturing but the only thing specific is that BNO passport holders can now take what's essentially a tourist visa to the UK for 12 months now instead of 6 months. i.e. you can come spend money but you can't earn money and it doesn't sound like a "door to citizenship".
So while it sounds magnanimous, it seems like a means to skim people already with assets rather than extending a political lifeline to petrol bomb throwers.
As long as they dont have Citizenship, they wont have any benefits such as medical, retirement and other benefits etc.
If I am going to guess they want people to fill them gap of some low cost labour that wont be available post Brexit.
Prior to (and because of) a bunch of HK residents fleeing to the UK when china first started trying to assimilate it, it was much easier to get out of there and into the UK. (anything involving politics in the UK is never a single thing, it's probably about 40 interacting things, spread out over about 800 non-consecutive years.)
HK is really a special case, because it was doing so very well with "european-levels of freedom", and then china strong-armed them into giving it up. (I won't make a moral judgement on that, it's just worth point out how complicated the issue is.)
Everyone in Hong Kong had a British passport as good as any British passport. 3am Parliament session revoked then all just before they announced the handover back to China. But what about the non-Chinese in hk? This is why ancestry visas existed. Not perfect, you got done non-white with that but not too many and you got pretty much all of white Hong Kong.
Now they'll take Hong Kong's 300k richest. How generous.
Where did you get that idea?
The 1983 act is just before they announced the 1997 handover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Territories_c...
"At the time of nationality reclassification in 1983, the largest group of BDTCs (2.5 million people) was associated with Hong Kong. The deprivation of full passports and nationality rights for colonial residents was criticized for effectively codifying ethnicity as the deciding factor in determining what rights British subjects were entitled to, an impression confirmed by exceptions granted to the majority white residents of Gibraltar and – after the Falklands War – the Falkland Islands. The British government was particularly unwilling to grant full citizenship and immigration rights to Hongkongers, fearing a mass migration to the UK after the transfer of sovereignty to China in 1997."