Border Net Porous : Hong Kong: Old Magnet for Chinese

On the previous night, he had helped to nab an oyster boat from the Chinese province of Fujian. It was carrying eight children below the age of 13, all of them tired and hungry.

Now, as darkness approached for another evening’s patrol in his speedy water-jet craft, Marine Police Inspector Lee Sinleung of the Royal Hong Kong Police was for a few brief moments in a somber mood.

“It’s like football (soccer),” he said, staring out across the water at the lights and new construction of the Chinese border town of Shenzhen. “And we are the goalkeepers.”

It is the job of Lee and hundreds of other Hong Kong police, British soldiers and Nepalese Gurkhas of the British army to patrol Hong Kong’s land and sea borders with China. Over the past couple of years, their task has been getting increasingly difficult.

Illegal Flow Surges

Illegal immigration from China, long a problem for the British colony of Hong Kong, is surging once again. For the past several years, the number of people detained and returned to China has been climbing steadily. Officials here believe the number of illegal immigrants who evade detection has been increasing, too.

In 1983, authorities in Hong Kong detained about 4,700 people trying to cross from China into the colony. The next year, the figure was 9,700. In 1985, it jumped to 12,600. And last year, the number was 16,800. A senior government official said that even before the end of March this year, 4,426 illegal immigrants had been caught, compared to 1,817 in the first three months of 1986.

The 22-mile land border between Hong Kong and China now looks like the boundary between East and West Germany. The British government has erected a 16-foot fence topped with double coils of barbed wire and razor-edged tape. High-intensity floodlights illuminate the fence at night. A special high-tech electrical system runs through the fence to alert troops whenever someone tries to cut it. Sensing devices lie buried in the ground nearby.

Dogs Wait at Fence

Some of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps detachment of 150 German shepherd dogs, trained in Britain to respond to commands in English, not the local Cantonese dialect, wait at outposts along the fence. Helicopters are available to carry dogs and troops to remote locations, and thermal imagery is used to spot would-be immigrants by their body heat.

Still, despite all these measures, many Chinese try and some--about 20% by official estimates--succeed in making it across.

“The basic reason for their coming is economic disparity,” Clive J. Richardson, assistant secretary for security for the Hong Kong government, said. “People here can earn a jolly sight more than people in China.”

Richardson noted that about 70% of those detained are men and that almost all are under the age of 35. Most come from the farms of the southern China provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Immigration is seasonal and tends to peak in October, after the fall harvest is completed.

Other Hong Kong officials suggest that the motive for the immigration is more than just economic.

“The reason they come is obvious,” Police Chief Inspector Joseph Cheung said. “There are two different systems.”

British and Hong Kong officials do not allow reporters to talk with the detainees. But based on their own interviews, they offer several explanations for the sharp annual increases in illegal immigration over the past four years.

The first is the greater ease of movement inside China. Young people on the farms of south China now have greater freedom and money to hop on buses, trucks or trains that will take them south to the border. Indeed, the immigration from China into Hong Kong is in a sense the final and most visible step in a more general pattern of southward migration inside China.

China’s Guangdong province--in particular, the Pearl River delta between Canton and Hong Kong--has the fastest-growing economy in China. Authorities in Canton have had to adopt strict new measures limiting immigration into their city. The flow of migration runs from other areas of China into Guangdong and from there to Hong Kong.

Clothing Blends In

The economic reforms that have brought China greater prosperity have also made law enforcement in Hong Kong more difficult.

“When I came here eight years ago, it was easy to spot an II (illegal immigrant),” one British official here said. “They came across in dark navy clothes. Now, they come in designer T-shirts and Levis, and it’s hard to tell them from residents of Hong Kong.”

The second reason for the upsurge, officials say, is the situation in Shenzhen, the Chinese special economic zone adjacent to Hong Kong.

Seven years ago, when Shenzhen was built up from a fishing village to a high-rise new town, authorities hoped its development would help attract restless young people and help stem the tide of immigration from the farms of south China into Hong Kong. To an extent, the idea succeeded, but now its effectiveness is wearing off.

“There’s more unemployment now in Shenzhen,” Richardson said. “While Shenzhen is developing, it’s reached a plateau.”

China Has a Fence, Too

Chinese authorities have erected their own fence, more than 50 miles long, limiting illegal immigration into Shenzhen. But Hong Kong law enforcement officials say the fence is not well patrolled and is easy to cut. Moreover, each time the police in Shenzhen threaten to send those who are working illegally in Shenzhen back home, some of them respond by making a last-minute run for Hong Kong.

The third reason advanced for the rise in illegal immigration is the continuing rumor that the Hong Kong government will grant some sort of amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Virtually every political event inside Hong Kong sparks false reports of an impending amnesty. Three years ago, when Britain agreed to return Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, there were rumors of an impending amnesty. When Britain’s Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth II visited Hong Kong last year, there were similar rumors.

“There will be no amnesty,” K. W. Cheung of the Hong Kong Immigration Department said. “Every illegal immigrant will be repatriated.”

‘Snake Heads’ in Trade

Hong Kong officials believe that the false rumors are spread by those involved in the illegal trade of transporting immigrants across the border. They are known here as “snake heads” and they charge as much as $2,500 for their services.

The snake heads have been particularly active in the seamiest aspect of the illegal immigration, the smuggling of children into Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government allows 75 people a day to emigrate legally from China into the colony. Some Chinese seize the opportunity to emigrate, leave children behind, and later seek to smuggle them in.

In one case in 1985, four young children drowned when a Hong Kong marine police craft collided with the boat in which they were being smuggled. Last November, 27 children were found abandoned on a speedboat in Hong Kong waters. More commonly, smaller numbers of children are found in the holds of decrepit junks or sampans.

The current wave is merely the latest in a series of outflows from China to Hong Kong. Indeed, overcrowded Hong Kong’s population of 5.5 million, 98% of it ethnic Chinese, has grown more than five-fold since World War II, mostly because of immigration from China.

Wave After Wave

One wave came in 1949-50, after the Communist takeover of China. Another occurred in 1962, when the economic disaster of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward caused widespread starvation in China. On a single day, May 23, 1962, Hong Kong authorities detained more than 5,600 illegal immigrants at the border.

The third wave came in the late 1970s, at a time when Hong Kong had what was known as the “touch-base” policy on immigration. Anyone who succeeded in crossing the border and made it into downtown Hong Kong was given an identity card and allowed to stay.

With the greater ease of movement inside China after the Cultural Revolution, tens of thousands of people attempted to cross into Hong Kong. More than 80,000 people were caught at the border in 1979, and another 80,000 were caught in the first 10 months of 1980.

In October, 1980, the government abolished the touch-base policy and began refusing to give new identity cards to illegal immigrants. Those caught downtown without identity cards were sent back to China, and employers caught hiring illegal aliens were fined. That series of actions stemmed the flow through the early 1980s.

Costly for Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s continuing need to hold down the exodus from China is expensive. According to K. A. Salkeld, an assistant secretary for security in the Hong Kong government, it costs $3.6 million a year merely to repair the border fence, keep up the electrical system and pay the costs of housing for troops along the fence.

Most of the army’s border patrol work is carried out by the Gurkhas, known for their almost legendary fighting ability. The Gurkhas, who are recruited from the tribes of Nepal in the Himalayan foothills, have served as mercenaries in the British army since the early 19th Century.

About 5,000 Gurkhas are stationed in Hong Kong, forming more than half of the British garrison in the colony. The British have not said what will happen to them after China takes over Hong Kong in 1997, although they have promised vaguely that there will be some future role for the Gurkha regiments, perhaps in Britain.

Despite all their other high-technology equipment, the British allow the Gurkhas to pursue illegal immigrants the old-fashioned way.

“The Gurkhas, being short, stubby, stocky little chaps, the easiest way to get them to the border is by bicycle,” Richardson said. “The Scottish Guards working at the border couldn’t use the bikes. Their knobby knees kept knocking on the handlebars.”

Troops Carry No Guns

The troops at the border carry night sticks, but no firearms. Hong Kong officials say that the Chinese caught at the border seldom put up any resistance.

Every afternoon, at exactly 3 o’clock, the British return a group of illegal immigrants to Chinese authorities across the border. Generally, the returnees will face a small fine in China but no jail term.

The repatriation of the immigrants has become a ritual. From detention centers in Hong Kong, those who have been caught are driven back over a border bridge into Shenzhen in an old blue Bedford bus with barred windows. There, they are met by green-uniformed Chinese soldiers, transferred onto a newer white Chinese bus, and driven off.

On a typical afternoon in February, the British bus carries 36 Chinese immigrants. At least one woman can be seen through the window grating. A few of the detainees carry small bundles of clothing that they brought with them across the border.

‘An Embarrassment’

At the border, Chief Inspector Cheung bars reporters or photographers from getting too close to the daily ceremonies.

“It’s too sensitive,” said Cheung, who serves on a liaison committee that meets regularly with Chinese officials. “It (the immigration) is an embarrassment. We have to maintain good relations with them.”

British officials say they believe the waves of immigrants will continue long after Hong Kong returns to Chinese sovereignty a decade from now since China has promised that Hong Kong may preserve its capitalist economic system for another 50 years.

“It’s a situation we’re always going to have,” Richardson said. “I can’t see it vanishing after 1997. There will still be two disparate economies.”