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| Hong Kong airport, once busy 24/7, is now busy only once a day： for the afternoon flights to the UK |
If so, it's nor surprising, as we know a number of friends and colleagues who've left Hong Kong. For good.
That number now is around 1,000 to 1,500 per day -- deduced from various data (and which I've not fact-checked).
Our government says it's no problem. They're just cracking hardy though.
1,000 a day is a million in three years; 1,500 is a million in just two. Of mostly working age folks, who've left and this time they're not coming back --unlike in 1997 when the jitters led some to head o/s to get foreign passports, before, in many cases, returning. We know that only from talking to them. Anecdote, in other words, not data. Still...
The loss of somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 per year -- the total population of my old home town of Canberra, Australia's capital -- is the loss of the most productive of our society. The loss won't be made up by births, which run at 80-some thousand per year. And it won't be made up by mainlanders moving to Hong Kong, which number about 50,000 per year.
Despite all this, I remain fairly optimistic about Hong Kong. It will be more mainlandised, but that's not all bad. And the economy will power along, as we remain a financial centre and will be more so as China IPOs that might have gone to the US will now come to Hong Kong. It’ll be “good enough”. And especially in comparison with other places to live … we’ve seen some come back after having headed “home”, finding that home is in fact here.
The red line for me still is whether or not I can freely connect with the world. If that changes then I'd be looking to move. The arrest of kiddie book publishers, and opposition activists I deplore, as does the world. But does my leaving stop that. And I do know the "First they came for..." lament.
In the meantime, I hang out here. In fact some old mates, an occasional reader, that had left Hong Kong for Europe a few years back have recently returned. Because, they said, despite it all, Hong Kong was still "the best place to live" for them.
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