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Comment by tobzuts | Hacker News Reader

Typical shoddy journalism. Bandies numbers about: '150.000', 'up to 3 million' , when talking about the numbers likely to qualify to come to UK but never actually tells us what the population of Hong Kong is in the first place. So is this everyone?... 50% of the population?... 25%?.. 10%?...

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Helpful hint: I find it very telling to mentally replace “up to” with “at most”. It’s the exact same inequality but sometimes (though not always) totally changes the emotional tone of a piece. The other thing is it never ceases to highlight the need for a lower bound. I think journalists (whether deliberately or unconsciously I cannot say, besides it isn’t relevant) use the term “up to X” to simultaneously proclaim the worst-case scenario AND use it to anchor your expectations (basically you become convinced that the worst case scenario is the most likely outcome because that’s the only information you have, whereas if you tell yourself “up to X” you immediately ask yourself “yeah okay but starting from what?” and the lack of knowledge is at least made explicit).

A quick Google would tell you the population of Hong Kong is 7,500,700 (2019 estimate).

The point is that from a journalistic point of view the number of people eligible for citizenship is meaningless without the context of either the population of Hong Kong or of the UK or perhaps the number of immigrants the UK typically sees from Hong Kong and other countries. It's very common in articles to see numbers that have no meaning without context. Either the context should be provided or the numbers should not be mentioned.

But even the Home Office doesn't know the exact number.

They know how many current BN(O) holders there are. But they don't know how many are eligible exactly -- they have the entire list of people who have received one, but that's over 20 years ago, and a lot could have happened to them since.

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