Britain’s Beijing Embassy Issues Last Hong Kong Visa

BEIJING — A traffic jam nearly made Liu Ting miss her date with destiny. She even had to persuade a janitor to let her into the British Embassy where, at 4:20 p.m. local time Thursday, she picked up the last visa to Hong Kong ever to be issued here by the territory’s colonial masters.

For Liu, the moment was not so much history being made as it was history being erased--the wiping away of more than a century of national humiliation. “This should never have happened 100 years ago,” she declared, echoing the official Communist Party line on Britain’s claiming of Hong Kong in 1842, after the first Opium War.

From now on, entry to Hong Kong will be handled by immigration authorities in the territory itself, a bureaucratic passing of the baton in advance of the formal reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control in less than two weeks. British consular sections the world over had stopped accepting visa applications for Hong Kong on May 30, giving out the final credentials Thursday.

But pity the Chinese citizen who believes that visiting Hong Kong will be a cakewalk after its glorious return to the motherland. Beijing announced months ago that the same restrictions that applied before will remain in force as part of the Sino-British agreement of “one country, two systems.”

In fact, the anticipated flood of applications from ordinary Chinese to go to Hong Kong is expected to make it even more difficult to secure one of the coveted permits. Already, Chinese authorities have suspended Chinese tourist travel to Hong Kong until July 15, to prevent an influx of sightseers during the hand-over period. Restrictions have also tightened on travel to the neighboring special economic zone of Shenzhen, which requires a border pass.

After July 1, illegal immigrants to Hong Kong will still be returned to the mainland, state-run media reported in March. And customs inspections will continue along the boundary between Hong Kong and Guangdong province where Shenzhen is located; a new, slightly modified line was officially approved Thursday by the outgoing British Hong Kong government and the Guangdong provincial government.

“The boundary between Hong Kong and Guangdong is one of the busiest in the world,” said John Ashton, the deputy political advisor who signed the agreement in Shenzhen on behalf of the British colonial government.

But the continuation of travel restrictions on regular Chinese to Hong Kong has not been well publicized by the government here, spawning confusion among many businesspeople who have no idea what to do or where to go now to obtain entry permits.

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The British Embassy is referring all inquiries to the Hong Kong Immigration Department. “It’s not anything to do with us anymore,” said embassy spokeswoman Harriet Hall.

Claire Bai, an employee at a Swiss trading company, said her colleagues are looking for ways to get into Hong Kong via other countries, such as Singapore. “We were told that the visas will not be issued for a period of time,” she said, “but how long, nobody knows.”

As for Liu--taken aback by the two or three journalists who caught her claiming the final Hong Kong visa to bear the stamp “British Embassy Peking”--her one regret was picking up the passport on behalf of a co-worker at the Beijing branch of the U.S.-based Motorola company.

“It should have been a Chinese company to get the last visa,” she said.