The Hong Kong Story – The BNO for BESEA
With the introduction of the BNO visa, Vy-liam Ng explores what this means both societally with regards to East Asian representation in the UK, especially in terms of how migration from E/SE Asia has been perceived in British culture; and politically, noting how this specific visa route was made in response to political turmoil, the make-up of those who could benefit from it, and what this means for us in the UK.
As a 7-year-old Brummie kid, the 1st July 1997 wasn’t hugely significant for me. On that day, I was likely far more interested in when Power Rangers would come back on or if my mother were going to make those chicken wings I liked. But in spite of my childlike musings, my parents for some reason, were glued to the TV.
Something was happening. Something majestic and momentous, a celebration with pomp and splendour, was being broadcast directly into our living room. A sea of colour, a rich red would adorn the screen and I remember, vividly, seeing amongst the white and brown faces, two flags held next to each other, a red one with stars, and the Union Jack. The latter being the only thing I could recognise. Unbeknownst to me, we were witnessing a moment in history, a moment which would serve as an allegory for an ongoing struggle with personal identity, being torn between my place as a British-Born person of Chinese ethnicity.
With the all-seeing power of Google and academic hindsight, I now know what that day was. It was the day Hong Kong, the Fragrant Harbour, was returned to China after 156 years of British colonial rule. That was the day the constitutional principle of “1 country, 2 systems” was implemented over the Hong Kong territory as it became a Special Administrative Region of China. That day, the city and its citizens would officially live under Chinese sovereignty, but it would maintain a unique legal, cultural, and economic personality of its own. There would be a political lacuna, a safeguard between Mainland China and Hong Kong, and despite the colonial misgivings of the past, there was at least a soft understanding that Hong Kong society was now, after generations of colonial influence, noticeably and markedly different.
However, a 50-year timestamp was placed on this special arrangement. What some saw as a 50-year transition period, others saw as a train wreck destined to collide against a wall of irreconcilable differences. Despite all this, my father would swell with pride that the “Chinese” have now regained their golden city from those colonial invaders. What I saw as a simple parade, he saw as a form of vindication and justice which bolstered the pride he found in his own Chinese identity.
Now the pride I found in being Chinese would come from two sources. My parents and Hong Kong cinema. To this day, I still have no pragmatic attachment to Hong Kong and I’ve yet to even visit the place; but I harbour a deep and personal affinity towards it. We are a Cantonese speaking house, we eat Cantonese food and I wanted so badly to walk in the shadows of those cool Hong Kong action stars of my childhood. I am Stephen Chow, Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao. And even though, in British society, I am racialised as “Chinese”, I understood the uniqueness of being the British born son of Malaysian and Vietnamese Chinese migrants, who looked upon Hong Kong as a cultural anchor to the Chinese world.
But why did that day mean more for my father than it did for me? Ignorance mostly. We don’t really learn about British Colonialization at school. We simplify the reach of Colonisation and we likely glossed over significant events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of India. The Mau Mau Uprising of Kenya. The Batang Kali slaughter of Malaya. Atrocities of the British Empire in which the Empire were the clear antagonists in the eyes of the downtrodden. It can be said that the story of Hong Kong is another tale lost in British history books. The first and second Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the unequal treaties which seceded the isle of Hong Kong to the British Empire in 1841, where the Empire, through the eyes of those in Hong Kong at the time, may have felt their tethers to their Chinese motherland and in turn, their Chinese identity, being ripped away.
However, like many others, just because I highlight the collective amnesia and saviour complex some have towards this majesty of colonialism, this does not mean that the Chinese Communist party automatically default to be the heroes in the story of Hong Kong.
Modern day geo-politics is complex, and if we were to only dance the dance of the old world, a world which dabbles in outdated principles of subjecthood, ethnic nationalism and unbridled political loyalty, then being Chinese can only ever mean one thing. Any “Han Chinese” is genetically pre-disposed to a certain political affiliation and that is scientifically and morally preposterous.
I won’t go into the depths of the Hong Kong protests. More knowledgeable people than me, with voices from within the struggle itself, have covered it and deserve that recognition. But what has been happening in Hong Kong is a story which reverberates across history. This is a fight in which there is a struggle to self-determine. To define, hold and keep a political identity unique to Hong Kong. And in this fight, in response to the overreach of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong, and to my surprise as someone who works in immigration law, the UK Government caught me off guard and introduced the British National Overseas (BNO) visa.
One part of me was elated to see our government, a government I am ideologically opposed to, step up in a human rights crisis and create a simple pathway towards British citizenship. Actions which are contrary to the hostile narrative I am accustomed to. This was a pragmatic and easy solution for those wanting to preserve their political identity. Why the British government cannot do this for other marginalised groups of which you could also argue, have a historical relationship with us, such as the Rohingya or the Karen, Gurkhas (that one took ages) or the swathes of Syrian refugees looking for safe asylum, and not forgetting the deplorable incompetence that made the Windrush generation, is beyond me and is a story for another time.
But a small part of me, admittedly a selfish part of me, was worried.
What did a large influx of East Asian faces mean for me and the British-born ESEA community? In my own struggle to identify my place in British society, where we face issues of equitable representation and a fight to combat racial prejudices, especially in this time of COVID, I was concerned about a vocal minority within the ideologically diverse Hong Kong protest group who could, possibly, drown us out: the ones who espoused similar racist, xenophobic attitudes that we see in the UK; the ones who would memorialise the British and align themselves with agitators such as Trump who hold authoritarian tendencies, and regard them as liberators in their fight against the Chinese Communist party.
Credit: Shutterstock
But don’t get me wrong, I truly understand this disparity in views and the political diversity of the Hong Kong protest group is not given fair credit. When the heel of totalitarianism is on the neck of democratic freedom, of course, any enemy of my enemy will become my friend. And while I wholly support the Hong Kong protestors, I am, at the same time, a sucker for social media. During any night of doom scrolling, one will find voices from within the British space who will, in the same breath, accuse those of Chinese ethnicity of eating bats, dogs and failing to meet western standards of cleanliness and then state that they look forward to welcoming the money of the high performing Hong Kong migrants. And of course, you can find some Hong Kong voices who welcome this narrative. I mean, this whole comment thread demonstrates the strangeness of this contradiction.
Those in the diaspora who have faced racism in the UK know that a racist does not care about the nuances of geo-politics. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Hong Kong, China, Singapore or the UK, when confronted with a racist, you will be racialised as Chinese, and your presence brings with it all the negative connotations of being Chinese. It is the same logic that some in Mainland China espouse that to be a real Chinese, you must uphold CCP values. We are one in the same to those with narrow views of the world.
So yes, I was worried about if those incoming from Hong Kong would join us in this fight against racism, or would they empower those voices who savour in demagoguery and the marginalisation of all minority groups. But this is because I’m a pessimist at heart. As an advocate for fair and humane immigration policies, I do see the BNO Visa as a net positive. When we desperately need more representatives, despite any differences in political ideologies, having more experiences and stories coming from within the ESEA community is of course a good thing.
When thinking about human rights and the commitment to democratic values, the BNO visa can serve as a beacon to uphold the principle that Hong Kong and Hong Kongers have a distinct political and legal personality separate to that of Mainland China, and people have a natural right to preserve this identity. As a British Born Chinese person, what I don’t want is for us to be used as political footballs.
Madeline Y Hsu’s book, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority traces this phenomenon in the USA. How the image of Asian migrants was purposefully shaped by dominant political powers, wherein this standard of the model minority was created by using Asians as the test subjects.
And like we see in discourse today, that generation of migrants also faced discriminatory and xenophobic prejudices which manifested swathes of anti-Chinese propaganda and the Chinese Exclusion Act, all at the same time, some in the Chinese group, were heralded as the good migrants. This allowed those in power to control how society perceived us and in placating some Chinese migrants, the dominant group could still benefit from us economically. A purposeful contradiction in messaging, but one careful and methodical tact to measure and divide us from within ourselves. While having this moniker of being highly valued, nascent immigrants may sound great for us, there is a bigger picture at play.
Madeline Y Hsu writes:
The model minority stereotype masks the sacrifices and downward mobility that many immigrants have made in order to succeed in America
Being a model minority predicates our worth upon us knowing our place, and this screws over every other migrant and their families for generations to come in setting an unachievable standard in an already inequitable system. We become the measuring stick all other migrants and even ourselves will be measured against if we play into these political narratives. We surrender our agency and identity to people who may not really care about us as British citizens. This is something that many BESEA and other minority groups contend with daily.
As Jeevan Vasagar writes, we should welcome Hongkongers but not the “good migrant” narrative. As he concludes and to which I wholly agree:
…people are people, with all of the complex desires and varied talents that this implies. It is risky to assume that an infusion of Hong Kong migration will give Britain an entrepreneurial rocket boost. Worse, a handful of cherrypicked success stories could easily become a stick to beat others with.
And with that in mind, let’s leave the model minority schtick in the world of old.
This article was amended on 23rd March 2021 to correct an error: the name Margaret Y Hsu was corrected to Madeline Y Hsu.
Vy-liam Ng is a writer, legal specialist, and PhD student in international human rights law, contributing regularly to platforms such as Resonate. His articles draw from his background in law, specifically, immigration and human rights. His current research focuses on the Rohingya, genocide and statelessness in East and South East Asia. He is also an International Student Adviser at Aston University. You can find him here on Twitter: @liam_vn, Instagram: @vyliamng and Resonate: https://www.weareresonate.com/author/vyliamng/