Hong Kong has been suffering a brain drain after years of enduring first anti-democracy crackdown and more recently Zero Covid lunacy. The Telegraph has the story.
The brain drain that Hong Kong is suffering from as tens of thousands of mainly middle-class, educated professionals seek to escape has become so extreme that even Carrie Lam, the city’s Chief Executive was forced to acknowledge it this week.
“It’s an unarguable fact that we have a brain drain and some senior management of some corporates have left Hong Kong,” she said on Wednesday.
Ms. Lam tried to blame it on the city’s coronavirus restrictions, which have isolated the city with 21-day quarantines on arrival, flight bans and shut infected people away in sparse Government facilities.
But the city has seen more and more people leaving ever since the turbulent pro-democracy protests of 2019.
Hong Kong’s population plunged at a record pace in the 12 months that ended in June 2021, officially putting it at about 7.39 million.
Many Hongkongers have come to the U.K., which opened its doors to them following Beijing’s democracy crackdown.
By December 2021, the U.K. had granted 97,000 visas to Hongkongers under the BNO visa scheme it opened to its former colony in response to the unrest. The Government estimates that by 2026 about 320,000 people will take up the visa, which offers a path to permanent British citizenship.
More than 22,500 Hongkongers have also taken up Canadian permanent residency, work or study permits in 2021, up 256% from 2019.
It’s an exit that does not appear to be slowing down – 43,200 left between March 1st and 15th this year, with over 5,000 recorded on March 6th alone – triggering a bout of hand wringing.
“For a city with a rapidly ageing demographic, financial and legal systems built around high-end human capital, and a culture enriched by overseas workers, the brain drain is both detrimental and disappointing,” opined the South China Morning Post recently.
Teachers and other academics have been particularly hard hit. [John] Lau said he knew he had to leave after the arrest in January last year of 47 prominent pro-democracy figures, including several opposition politicians, who were charged with conspiracy to commit subversion.
He said he did not fear an “imminent” threat but thought it was wise to plan ahead as his pro-democracy views were known.
The academic world had already been shaken by suspicions that colleagues with a history of rights activism had mysteriously failed to have their contracts renewed. Many feared they were secretly being observed and monitored in the classroom.
Worth reading in full.
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Good article. ‘Hide the expansion’. ‘Hide the Arctic is not doing much of anything when compared to historical data’.
So the recent cold spell is due to the melting Arctic which blah blah causes the changey thingy blah blah and makes it colder (please send money for further ‘research’).
Except the 1% global ice volume Arctic and Greenland Ice sheets (15%) are expanding or doing not much of anything if viewed historically. So how can a stable Arctic which is not melting cause cold snaps due to plant food as stated by the climate religion? And if the winter was mild like 2 winters ago then what is the answer?
The idiocy of the Klimat-tard cult boggles, along with their fascistic pursuit of money and power. No morality in the Gaia cults. $cience. Follow the Trillion$.
These tired old bones prefer warmth to cold. I do not consider it an improvement if the Arctic is getting colder. OK, sea level is still rising gently. If anyone complains that the sea will flood homes in 100 years, ask them how old their present dwelling is – invariably much less than that.
That’s also just nonsense. Large parts of the Netherlands and Belgium have been below sea-level ever since they came to be dry land at all due to human work (and pre-industrial technology) being put into making that happen. Where sea-levels are a problem, people build dikes. They’re common throughout all of the continental shore of the North Sea.
And yet………
Melting ice caps will enable China’s military forces to “reach into the Atlantic”, the Chief of the Defence Staff has warned.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/14/chinas-military-could-reach-atlantic-ice-caps-melt-warns-armed/
That’s good to know
. If we have time to worry about the Chinese navy once the polar ice caps have melted because of climate change, climate change in itself must be harmless.
Perhaps someone will tell some bloke called Radakin, chief of defence or the suchlike, with his alarmist statement the Chinese will be able to sail round the melting poles into the Atlantic. But then again just a bid for more defence spending to be blown on civil servants and undelivered projects
Probable a stupid question, but don’t the Chinese have nuclear powered submarines that can go under the ice?
Extrapolating 30 or 40 years of Arctic sea ice to try and explain 4 billion years of climate change on our planet is like looking at a bare patch of 1 square cm of my 5 acre farm, and calling it a desert, when it is actually an abundance of green.
The pushers of the climate con do not understand context, or else are truly corrupted by a financial motive (Al Gore et al).
Definitely the latter.
Motive is more about power and control, the financial element of course comes trotting after.
Another good trick is to adjust old temps down and new temps up, creating a scary slope. Then project to the moon.
https://realclimatescience.com/rewriting-the-climate-at-nasa/
I’m fairly certain this documentary from 2007 is the one I saw on channel 4 ( obv not BBC material! ) back in the day, and ever since then I’ve known that man-made global warming to be complete hogwash;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTq8-hnDeyk&ab_channel=ClaudeStrobbe
It wasn’t that long ago The Coming Ice Age: With Leonard Nimoy was worrying over an imminent ice age and how we could potentially halt it with black soot on the ice sheets, and whatever their data back then concluded that ice age was still possible after the industrial revolution was well established (and that thing that causes all the [supposed] warming) so they know there are many [other] factors at play.
Now they’re warning of the complete opposite whilst ignoring all these other factors? Just goes to show the data can be presented to fit any hypothesis, from one extreme to another. Granted they were wrong back then, but that doesn’t mean the opposite is true now (unless of course an ice age is still on the cards). Their fraudulent data might support a warming planet, given that mini-mini ice age was used as a convenient baseline but that doesn’t make the warming (even if there genuinely was any) man made or anything outside the norms either. Why is that period considered normal and today’s not normal?
Thank god they didn’t cover the ice with black soot! Imagine the total catastrophe that would have been. Honestly, when are these people going to understand that we live on something infinitely more complex, interrelated, and balanced than we could ever imagine and that tinkering with its mechanisms is the one thing that will cause the problems we are trying to avert! Better by by far to live in this magnificent place, be a part of it as we already are, and learn to dance with its changes and adapt in a creative, harmonious way than trying to play god at every shadow that looms.
Thanks for all the data and reporting. We Greenland polar bears are especially thankful that the truth about the ice pack and the melting — hah! — of our glaciers is being told by someone in the media who is not engaged in climate propaganda. — Grandpa Polar Bear https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BQ2B29GP
Spot on article. The fact that they hide the data is 100% correct and very sad. This website below used to be fantastic and had masses of historical surface area data about ice extent in both the Arctic and Antarctic, but now it only shows the daily satellite pictures (these seem to have stopped in Sept 2022) with no surface area data.
https://cryosphere.today
I know because I used to regularly monitor the site 20 years ago.
Confessions of a Computer Modeler
“Any model, including those predicting climate doom, can be tweaked to yield a desired result. I should know.”
After three iterations [of remodeling] I finally blurted out, “What number are you looking for?” He didn’t miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed.
I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
Was the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] official asking me to lie?
I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program. (Congress ended the grants in 1990.)
Robert J. Caprara, “Confessions of a Computer Modeler,”
The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2014
https://www.wsj.com/articles/confessions-of-a-computer-modeler-1404861351
.
“There is something fascinating about science. On gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact”——Mark Twain. ——-But in those days scientists were actually indulging in a genuine search for truth. It would be interesting to see a quote from Mr.Twain about today’s Government funded data adjusters and their genuine search for anything that seems to support public policy and ignores everything that doesn’t
Chris I think your headline is a bit unfair. If scientists were hiding the data we wouldn’t have it available to us. Its mainstream media where most of the problem lies because they refuse to accurately report on what is actually happening if it doesn’t support the crazy net zero agenda. There must be scientists who see what is really happening and who would love to report it on TV but are never given the opportunity. People like Attenborough have lost any credibility they had with anybody who does any research on climate and he has become no more than a purveyor of a lying pile of political propaganda. He is either too old or too stupid or working to a political agenda to report things accurately and he has unlimited use of our TV licence fees to do it on the BBC. While this is the case many people watch his extortionately funded programs full of inaccurate or distorted data and believe the rubbish he spouts. Surely there must be somewhere, a UK TV station to take this crap on and set the record straight.