Nationality vs ethnic identity: Attitudes toward passports by China, other national governments and a multiplicity of people in Hong Kong

As far as governments are concerned, it is the nationality of a person, usually reflected in a passport, that shows whether the government has a duty to protect that individual and whether the person owes obligations to the state. Hong Kong is unusual in that for many people there, passports are primarily seen as documents that offer safety and security. It is not unusual for people to possess two or more passports. The purpose of this paper is to examine attitudes toward passports on the part of Hong Kong people, formed by their unique experience.

This paper analyzes key documents, such as China’s Nationality Law and a little known document, “Explanations of Some Questions by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress Concerning the Implementation of the Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” The paper also looks at the Loh case of August 2016, involving a Canadian man who wanted a Hong Kong passport for his 11-year-old Canadian-born son, and the Patrick Tse case, where Hong Kong tried to strip a teenager who possessed German nationality of his Hong Kong passport.

The convenience of travel to China with a Home Return Permit seems to outweigh any sense of loyalty to an adopted country in the west, or the realization that the use of a document identifying its holder as a Chinese national means that she/he would not have any consular protection. It is also ironical that the Hong Kong Government should maintain the difference between nationality and ethnicity at a time when the Chinese Government is doing the very opposite, playing down the status of nationality while magnifying the importance of so-called “Chinese blood.”

This paper examines a topic that has not been widely studied but is likely to become more important in the years to come as China’s impact on the rest of the world increases. The nationality status of ethnic Chinese will increasingly become an issue as the flow of travel between China and other countries rises and Chinese immigrants continue to take up foreign nationality. While this issue is of special importance to Hong Kong, its impact will extend to countries around the world, in fact, to wherever Chinese persons are to be found.