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Introduction
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. This paper examines 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 two court cases, the Hudson Loh case of August 2016, involving a Canadian man and his 11-year-old Canadian-born son, and the Patrick Tse case of 2002, also involving a minor. Both cases relate to the issuance of Hong Kong passports and, as far as the author can determine, have not been the subject of academic research thus far.
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 while the Chinese Government is doing the very opposite, playing down the status of nationality while magnifying the importance of so-called “Chinese blood.”
The Loh case
In August 2016, the case whereby a Canadian man, Timothy Loh, took the Hong Kong Government to court for refusing to give his 11-year-old Canadian-born son, Hudson Timothy George Loh, a Hong Kong special administrative region passport, was heard in the High Court. Both the boy’s parents were Canadian nationals at the time of his birth in Canada, and the boy himself already possessed a Canadian passport, yet his father insisted that his son had a right to an SAR...