HK row sparks patriotism debate

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7468650.stm

Version 0 of 1.

By Vaudine England BBC News, Hong Kong

Many Hong Kong residents hold multiple travel documentsOver coffee, a woman explained to her friend that her husband spent every summer in Canada, where they had a house, while her daughter was in Australia at university.

She kept the apartment in Hong Kong, where her mother lived in another apartment upstairs; her son was setting up house in Shanghai.

But Hong Kong was still home for all of them.

It was a typical Hong Kong conversation and, for its middle classes at least, an unsurprising combination of locales and loyalties, with this ethnically Chinese family boasting at least three different kinds of travel documents.

But nowadays in Hong Kong, political manoeuvring has raised the status of passports to indicators of patriotism - a loaded term generally taken here to mean support not just for China as a nation but for the current communist government in Beijing.

How could this come about? Why has Hong Kong's genuinely global society started to look askance at how many passports people have?

What may have begun as clever politics has evolved into a broader debate about what makes a Hong Konger

So far, local commentators say, the spotlight has been confined to political leaders - whose passports are taken to reflect their political loyalties - rather than ordinary people.

But in a month-long row, fears have grown that the cosmopolitanism at the heart of Hong Kong's autonomy from mainland China could be under threat.

Defining 'patriotism'

The row blew up after eight deputy ministers and nine political assistants were appointed by Chief Executive Donald Tsang in May.

The idea behind the newly created posts was that political appointees would provide more accountable government than bevies of civil servants.The row emerged after Donald Tsang made several political appointments

The obvious problem with the theory, pointed out by Hong Kong's feisty democratic camp, is that without proper elections, there is no mechanism for getting rid of ministers and none has yet taken responsibility for anything.

Instead, say the critics, the appointees are government loyalists who get in the way of professional managers at the expense of taxpayers.

Forced onto the defensive, the government found itself batting off demands for disclosure not just of the high wages paid for ill-defined duties, but of the appointees' nationalities.

The pan-democratic opposition mounted a concerted campaign, questioning the opaque nature of the appointment process, the US$17,000 (£8,600) to US$28,600 monthly salaries being paid to allies of the chief executive, and the new staffers' claimed loyalty to Hong Kong.

The most prominent new appointee, Greg So, is deputy chairman of the pro-Beijing political party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB).

Alongside his Hong Kong identity and Chinese nationality, he also holds a Canadian passport.

The question was raised: How patriotic can Mr So be if he has kept his foreign nationality? It then came to light that most of the new appointees held dual nationality.

The government mishandled the affair from the start - refusing to reveal the salaries on offer only to be forced into a humiliating apology and full disclosure.

On the nationality issue, it first stated that the Basic Law, Hong Kong's constitution, did not require deputy ministers to relinquish second passports. Then it refused to reveal who did or did not have extra passports.

Finally, public pressure forced most of the new appointees to say they would give up their foreign citizenship, to "prove" their patriotism.

Identity debate

The ramifications are only beginning to be played out.

Many people in Hong Kong hold a second passport, from the uncertain years before Hong Kong was handed from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

As negotiations over the colony's future dragged on, any Hong Kong family that could afford it moved at least some of their members to Europe, Canada, the US, Australia or New Zealand, to earn nationality abroad as a form of insurance, in case the handover went badly.Recent events have focused attention on issues of identity

Many of those people have since returned to Hong Kong, their home, and have kept those second passports in the drawer for a rainy day.

They may have children studying abroad, or own properties in the West. Dual nationality and complex loyalties have long been seen as part of being a Hong Konger.

They have also long been seen as a guarantor of Hong Kong's international character, a way to assert the city's fundamental difference to mainland China, and as a vital underpinning of Hong Kong's autonomy as a special administrative region of China.

It is no accident perhaps that the row has blown up in a year where definitions of identity are already in the news.

On 2 May, Hong Kong streets were awash with people wrapping themselves in the Chinese flag as the Olympic torch relay jogged through town. (Many of those on the streets were from mainland China, but Hong Kong people also felt the fervour.)

Then the earthquake struck in Sichuan, prompting an outpouring of emotion for the victims and a continuing rush of donations from wealthy Hong Kong to the impoverished mainland.

What may have begun as clever politics has evolved into a broader debate about what makes a Hong Konger.

Baptism of fire

The Beijing authorities have kept almost completely out of it, only mildly praising those who have said they will renounce foreign nationalities.

Anyone ethnically Chinese is claimed as Chinese by China's Nationality Law - meaning that counts of, for example, Americans in Hong Kong are much lower by official bodies than the number known to the American consulate.

But a ruling by the Standing Committee of the National Peoples' Congress in May 1996 allowed for the special conditions of Hong Kong when it said that Chinese nationals of Hong Kong with the right of abode in foreign countries "may for the purpose of travelling to other countries and territories, use the relevant documents issued by the foreign governments".

Meanwhile, Mr Tsang's appointees, lambasted in letters columns as grossly overpaid trainees, have had a political baptism of fire.

For good or ill, identity politics have taken centre stage in Hong Kong.

And Mr Tsang has been made to look "stupid", as a former senior civil servant put it, less than three months ahead of legislative elections.