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To: Mark Adams who wrote (6699)	8/5/2001 1:43:15 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 74559

Hi Mark, <<end of British Rule ... flight of compatriots to places such as Singapore, Australia or Vancouver BC?>> Seriously, at the time, and for many years (say, 7-9) before, the folks that mattered, while not the best and brightest, but certainly the cautious, had second and even third passports already, and this group included most highly paid folks working in the central business district. The final exodus from 1993-1997 were comprised of 'lesser' (social, wealth, education) folks who were genuinely afraid, and they sailed for Canada and Australia mostly, some to US, almost none to Singapore, and very few to Britain; collectively at 1% per year. More seriously, Singapore was being too picky for what control-frenzied Singapore had to offer a free-wheeling Hong Konger. Britain simply was never an attractive destination that the Britons believed England was. Britain offered 50,000 passports to folks who was supposed to qualify on the basis first-come-first-serve objective evaluation scheme, and I believe less than 8,000 were taken up. The then newly departed sold their HK apartments at a low price, bought into their new homes at a high price, and later tried to reintegrate themselves into Hong Kong and discovered that they were priced out of the market. Macao residents were uniformly and unconditionally issued Portuguese passports leading up to their handover to China in 1999. Hardly anyone left, and now all travel freely throughout EU. <<if the best and brightest fled to new locales, those new locales had a good chance to bloom themselves>> I think the new locales mostly did do better as a result of the HK boat (big boats) people, but overall, HK did not suffer from the drain of brain and wealth, because the seriously best and brightest did not bother to flee, confident that they can do anything at anytime going anywhere. Immediately after the handover in 1997, HK was swamped by 'returnees' seeking work and new HK residency papers (12 months window allowed by the new authorities). A study was made and showed the returnees would have done better economically and career-wise had they stayed, and many returnees blamed the press for hyping the impending doom (so, whatelse is new), thus driving them to make a bad decision. One of life's many unexpected outcomes. Chugs, Jay