Hong Kong refugees will enrich Britain

If we open the door to Hongkongers, it’ll boost our economy and hurt China’s

Britain’s offer of residence rights to three million Hong Kong citizens has prompted Chinese threats of retaliation. What kind of retaliation, though, would be proportionate? Might China offer spaces to three million British citizens? I can think of one or two Maoist statue-smashers here who might want to take them up.

How odd that Beijing should see Britain’s visa policy as any of its business. The United Kingdom has always recognised that it has obligations to the people of Hong Kong. The basis of the 1984 accord was, essentially, that China could get the land as long as the people living on it kept, at least until 2047, the rights they enjoyed as British subjects. China has now flagrantly violated that deal, snuffing out political freedoms in Hong Kong and making it clear that the inhabitants of that territory will be treated like Uighurs or Tibetans – that is, as renegades to be brought to heel.

Britain’s response, in the circumstances, is remarkably modest.

We have not aimed diplomatic or commercial sanctions at the Chinese. We have not taken any action against them at all. All we have done is to honour our promise to Hongkongers. If they cannot enjoy freedom under Chinese sovereignty, let them come and enjoy it under British sovereignty.

“China strongly condemns this and reserves the right to take further measures,” is how the Chinese foreign ministry reacted to Boris Johnson’s announcement. “The British side will bear all the consequences”.

Yes, we will. And those consequences will be overwhelmingly positive. The arrival of several hundred thousand enterprising and industrious Hongkongers (it is vanishingly unlikely that all three million will take up the offer) will enormously boost our economy.

Conversely, their departure will impoverish China, which has done very well out of having a low-tax, low-regulation, high-wage entrepôt on its doorstep, blessed with secure property rights, global trading links, common law norms and judges who don’t take bribes.

History is often made by population movements. In 1685, France revoked the religious tolerance that its Protestant subjects had enjoyed for nearly a century, prompting a mass exodus. The so-called Huguenots were not, as is often claimed, expelled. On the contrary, like the unhappy denizens of Communist China, they were forbidden to emigrate. But they crammed into any vessel they could find, fleeing to Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries and, most of all, Britain and its colonies, notably North America and South Africa.

A glance at our Huguenot surnames shows the mark they left on fields as diverse as literature (du Maurier), eye-care (Dollond), painting (Millais), acting (Olivier), industry (Courtauld), religion (Chartres) and politics (Farage).

But their most immediate contribution was as entrepreneurs and financiers – the first governor of the Bank of England, for example, was a Huguenot. Some historians argue that their arrival, and the simultaneous loss to France, tipped the balance in the chronic war between the two powers that lasted from the late seventeenth century until the Battle of Waterloo. Although France had all the advantages of territory, population and material resources, it never recovered from the departure of its most enterprising and market-oriented citizens.

China has made a similar choice and for similar reasons, prizing ideological conformity over the messy business of wealth-creation. Britain should again position itself as the beneficiary. If Hongkongers can’t make money at the mouth of the Pearl River, let them make it at the mouth of the Thames, the Tyne or the Solent. Give them land to build their own charter city, their Hong Kong 2.0. And let their wealth spill over into the rest of Britain.

‘Britain will bear all the consequences.’ – Yes we will. And those consequences will be overwhelmingly positive