There is no fixing this, but I appreciate the effort by the British. Many will not want to leave, understandably. But the threat of draining HK is an interesting sort of pressure to put on China..
This is very much a long term, self-interest thing. Britain (just like any other developed country) heavily depends on immigration to not fall into Japanese-style deflation, since nobody wants to have kids any more. Hong-Kongers will probably make for some really good immigrants.
That's what good business is like: win-win. The only downside is the possible retaliation by the CCP. And let's see if they actually let people leave HK en masse, or will they just lock all exits. And let's see how many people will actually want to go, even if you open all the doors for them. Whoever really wanted to leave has probably left quite a while ago.
Having a new source of immigration when you have just screwed yourself over in attracting European immigrantes due to Brexit is common sense rather than altruism.
Immigration is not actually something you need to have.
It's something the UK needs to have. We don't have enough qualified doctors, nurses, AHPs, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, electronic engineers, (any engineers), architects, etc etc etc.
In the absence of immigration, assuming the void you describe were perceived, I would expect the UK to accelerate the qualification process for doctors, engineers, nurses, AHPs, engineers, architects, etc., without much affecting the quality of the doctoring / nursing / engineering that got done.
This is, for example, how people were trained to understand spoken Japanese when that became important in World War II. The first attempt involved approaching universities with Japanese programs, who all solemnly declared that learning to understand Japanese was a deliberate process involving multiple years of study. The second attempt involved a course developed for the purpose, not by the universities, that turned out functioning translators in six months.
In England "registered nurse" is a protected title. The requirements for being a registered nurse have changed over time. You used to be able to qualify then register, or work then register without getting the qualification. So we have a natural experiment with older nurses in England. Some are qualified and registered, some are unqualified and registered. We see from research that the qualification helps with patient safety.
I hope you can see that there are significant differences between learning a language and treating patients.
As described, you see from research that nurses with the qualification are better than nurses in the same cohort without. This is confounded all kinds of different ways; it doesn't come close to establishing that the qualification helped.
(The most obvious confound, though -- say, do nurses with a bachelor's degree outperform nurses with "some college"? -- does tend to suggest that, in the absence of immigration, overall quality levels will go down if the average quality of immigrants is higher than the average quality of natives.)
> I hope you can see that there are significant differences between learning a language and treating patients.
Of course, but I don't see that those differences are relevant here.
I feel like Indians already benefit from this which is why they seem to be making very effective managers.
I don't know where you are getting your information that the population of Japan is still growing. Japan's population is already declining.
http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/pdf/2017all.pdf "Statistical Handbook of Japan" Table 2.2
https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2020/ ( https://www.populationpyramid.net/sources )
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/japan-demographic...
https://qz.com/1295721/the-japanese-population-is-shrinking-...
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00705/ "Japan’s Population Falls for Ninth Straight Year"
https://www.ft.com/content/29d594fa-5cf2-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a0... "Japan’s population decline accelerates despite record immigration"
Even your link confirms that the population is in decline, just not as quicky as some reporters say.
"While the fertility rate declined from 4.32 in 1949 to a low of 1.26 in 2005, the total population was increasing >>until 2011<< "
"Japan’s Population Decline Not as Rapid as Media Portrays".
I just noticed I could replace 2017 with 2019 in the official statistics link and did so, resulting in http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/handbook/pdf/2019all.pdf
It is the same Table 2.2 That still shows a decline and projected decline.
I am not seeing anything that backs up your assertion that
> birthrate of Japan is considered low, but they are growing still
If you still want to assert this as fact then you are going to have to provide a reason that the Japanese government's own statistics and projections over at least the last 5 or so years are incorrect and what should be used as authoritative data instead.
Not to worry, they'll still have a chance to turn it into Windrush Generation later on.
What the Brits should have done was to push reforms for democratic governance before they left. They could have allowed a fully democratic local government that would have survived the handover and been enshrined in the Basic Law. Instead, all promises of letting HK some democratic autonomy have been broken and stepped on, leading to the current situation.
China didn't like this idea of introducing democratic reforms in HK before the handover but the Brits are still at fault. A colony is a dictature, the British had no interest in having any type of self-governance framework for HK.
In the past 10 years -until the events of last year- there was little outspoken hate for China in HK. Most people were OK with the notion of being Chinese and part of China as long as their rights and freedoms were still honoured.
China could/should have used HK as an experiment to show that its overall control didn't fear some level of local democratic process. Instead the CCP just showed the opposite: how fragile and fearful the it is of any potential dissent.
[edit: spelling]
> the British had no interest in having any type of self-governance
That is false. In the 1960s, the UK did want to introduce democratic reforms.
> China didn't like this idea of introducing democratic reforms in HK
That is the understatement of the year. The correct historic account is that the CCP threatened use of military force, so the UK reacted expediently by backing off.
I wonder if that is the game plan China is following? They have given up on the current generation , and are now hoping the next generation will follow them?
A few decades before negotiations began between China and the UK, India seized the Portuguese colony of Goa[1]. Nobody acted on behalf of the Portuguese. With the USA having just a few years beforehand suffered defeat in the Vietnam war, and extremely unlikely to have the public support for another land war in Asia, but this time against a vastly stronger opponent for a relatively much less important parcel of land, There is little reason to believe anyone would have, or could have seriously contested China seizing Hong Kong.
Consider as well, during the Korean war, A China still badly crippled by World War 2 almost single handedly defeated an entire coalition of western powers, including a USA at the zenith of their conventional arms power.
The declaration was an alternative to a military annexation of Hong Kong by the Chinese.
The British probably acquiesced more than they had to, and didn't guarantee enough rights for Hong Kong citizens (especially the really lame part about not giving them a path to citizenship in the UK proper), but make no mistake, the alternative to the declaration wasn't Hong Kong remaining a part of the UK, it was Chinese invasion.
I think the 1.5M North Korean who died might disagree that China "almost single handedly defeated the coalition".
China paid a huge price for that war that ended in a stalemate. 200,000 dead and probably the same wounded/missing. That's ~12% of the Chinese military at the time.
By contrast the US lost ~1M dead/wounded in WW2 out of a peak strength of 12M.
Interesting, one reason why the US strategy in Vietnam was limited was the fear of China entering the war. Based on a few accounts I've read, China had zero intention of actually engaging in combat as they were still smarting from the Korean war.
The troops sacrificed were also mostly former Nationalist units from the civil war that ended the year before.
Isn't that because China got the drop on the western powers?
China did do a good job of attacking where the UN wasn't expecting as well.
Meaning what exactly?
I suspect that if the trickle shows any sign of becoming a significant exodus, a state of emergency will be called and all HK-ers passports will be cancelled, probably under the pretext of issuing new documents. While the US is shifting it's focus to the Asia Pacific region [0], that's probably hollow posturing. Even if the US had the willingness, what could they do on China's doorstep (beyond bluster) that wouldn't trigger a major military crisis? If Hong Kong is China's Anschluss, will Taiwan be its Poland? I sincerely doubt the current US administration has the diplomatic nouse to out-maneuver China here. The failure to check China is likely to send a shockwave around the world, signalling to allies the truth of what they already suspect - that is, that an increasingly withdrawn and internally focused US will not willingly elect to spend its blood and treasure defending anything but its immediate interests. In Australia, the government has signalled a huge (by our standards) increase in military spending in the next decade, as a consequence of this reality [1].
The times, they are a changin'.
[0] https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Tho...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-30/australia-unveils-10-...
And the idea at the time was certainly that China would change in the five decades until unification. This was shortly after the end of the cold war, after all, which demonstrated that such change is possible, if not inevitable.
Thinking may have changed on that point. But I wouldn't fully exclude the possibility that China 2047 is more democratic than it is today. Things remain the same, until suddenly they don't.
In 1997 most people wouldn't have thought it would be possible (or at least likely) for China to both be such a powerful country and be such an authoritarian country.
There’s a reason they decided to ratchet up the pressure on HK the last few years. They figured that in the worst case slapping a specific brand on a few hotels in a few major Chinese cities is a cheap price to pay.
Did they do that?
Everything that has happened in HK so far conforms to the HK constitution as well as Beijing’s, whether it meets the spirit of the declaration or not
Great history lesson. I'm not sure what any of that has to do with the younger generations in HK suffering their freedoms, and perhaps human rights, being stripped away in 2020.
Yeah, good thing China "has nuclear". /s
Which I suppose this naive belief is part of the fear that is causing the current situation.