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Comment by basicplus2 | Hacker News Reader

A thought experiment..

What if a country would say to every Hong Kong person.. come to our country, build a new Hong Kong in our country, tranplant the whole there, and be free, bringing all the culture and business with you

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Bizarely enough, that was actually briefly considered by government officials in 1983, to relocate everybody in Hong Kong to Northern Ireland: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/03/uk-officials...

High cost and a lot of ways to go wrong means that it isn't worth it. One of the ways it might go wrong is that only the poorest socioeconomic class takes this option, taking almost no business with them and adding very little of value to the economy of the country they are transplanted into. What they will bring is all the inherent troubles of integrating a displaced people into a different culture, such as racism and just tribalism in general.

It's not worth it for the country they are transplanted into and it's not a given that it will be worth it for the people moving.

a lot of people already left Hong Kong right in-between the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Tiananmen Massacre. millions of them. they knew what would eventually happen to HK: full-on China. so many left that Toronto has little Hong Kong, and London is full of former HK businesses, or new businesses made after the HKers came over.

Nobody will say that. Plus, it was a very specific set of conditions and circumstances that led to Hong Kong being what it is, leading to the present days. You can't just transplant it.

To be fair, the set of conditions and circumstances cropped up in Singapore as well. One could be forgiven for thinking that if the circusmtances could be engineered then, they could be engineered now.

One of the main circumstances is a common border with the mainland with proximity to Shenzhen. How do you engineer that?

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