Criticism of HK grossly misplaced
Updated: 2014-06-09 07:10
(HK Edition)
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The first reaction of most of us to the recent criticisms against Hong Kong being laid at our doorstep by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) is to marvel that its members couldn't find far bigger problems in the globe's political hotspots.
CESCR attributed these five "sins" to Hong Kong: poor treatment of asylum seekers, new immigrants, ethnic minorities, foreign domestic workers and sexual minorities.
In the interests of saving space let's concentrate on our treatment of asylum seekers. Between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s the population of Hong Kong doubled from 2.2 million to 4.4 million as a result of the breathtaking influx of, mostly Cantonese-speaking, peasants flooding over the border hoping to find a more prosperous future here.
Month after month the influx averaged 100,000 men, women and children! And unbelievably Hong Kong squeezed them all in. Admittedly they had no choice but to house themselves in the hillside squatter settlements that sprang up on the outskirts of urban districts on either side of Victoria Harbour. And after grimly gaining this "toehold" they had then to eke out a livelihood.
Life was very tough in those shanty towns, especially for the mothers and children. Nevertheless, local church organizations and charitable groups, although overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem, still managed to provide a significant degree of help.
The government of the day simply didn't have the funds to offer much assistance. The economy was struggling to recover from the Japanese occupation of 1942-45, which had brought commerce to a halt. Then, just as a modest export trade was beginning to develop, the Korean War (1950-53) broke out and nobody wanted to buy products tainted with Asian origins.
But as international demand for cheap products eventually overcame such prejudices and trade began to prosper the refugees, and their children, were to provide the manpower and muscle for what would eventually burgeon into the Hong Kong economic miracle.
As its finances improved the government gradually reached a position where it could begin to close down the squatter settlements and re-house those tenacious families in resettlement estates across urban Hong Kong. The first was built at Shek Kip Mei following the horrendous squatter fire there that left 50,000-plus homeless and sleeping in the streets during the freezing weather of Christmas 1953.
Fast forward 20 or so years and Hong Kong was again temporarily accommodating another influx of asylum seekers - boatload after boatload of Vietnamese refugees from their war-torn country. From 1975 we took in a quarter of a million of them, some of whom could not be resettled overseas despite the efforts of then British colonial administration. Not until 1999 was that financially draining, socially and politically disruptive problem finally settled, with 143,700 being resettled while the remaining 67,000 had to be repatriated to their homeland.
This was how Hong Kong, twice, went far beyond all normal expectations of humanitarian aid rendered to homeless and vulnerable refugees.
The figures add up to refuge in Hong Kong having been granted to almost 2.5 million people. Furthermore, if we take into account the fact that Hong Kong's area, including scores of uninhabitable islands, totals only around 400 square miles (1,000 square km), it is without doubt the greatest act of humanitarian charity by a state or territory in modern history.
In the circumstances would all members of CESCR kindly take note that, instead of being guilty of "poor treatment" of asylum seekers, we can say with pride that no other territory in the world has achieved anything remotely approaching our charity towards refugees in general. But instead of praise we hear in the background the clamor of critics saying, "No, no, no - we are not talking about what happened before; forget all that. It's your present failings which are so wrong."
They complain that since taking over responsibility for refugees from the UN last March, Hong Kong has made refugee-related procedures "difficult". The fact is that the refugee problem of our current times is beyond any single territory's capacity to resolve, bearing in mind the undisguised anti-refugee sentiment of many countries.
Australia helped greatly in accepting large numbers of Vietnamese; however, it has now had enough of boatloads of queue-jumping refugees and is sending them back to Indonesia, where smuggling people to Australia by sea had become a growth industry.
Australia's tough new stance has seen Canberra cut deals with Papua New Guinea and even Cambodia to re-house earlier batches of these unwelcome boat people.
Finally, let's not forget that every year Hong Kong spends more than HK$500 million in providing food, welfare, legal aid and other services to the 6,000 refugees already here, mainly from Africa and South Asia.
The author is the op-ed editor with China Daily Hong Kong Edition.
(HK Edition 06/09/2014 page1)