Love it or leave it
SCMP
Christine Loh Kung-wai is chief executive of the think-tank Civic Exchange. cloh@civic-exchange.org
The big news of the month – possibly the year – is not the constitutional reform package released on Wednesday but the Gallup survey released on November 6 (and reported in the Sunday Post) that found a million more people, a seventh of Hong Kong’s population, would prefer to leave the city rather than move to it.
The polling specialist, Gallup, produced a global Potential Net Migration Index estimating the number of adults who would like to move permanently out of a jurisdiction subtracted from the estimated number who would like to move to it, as a proportion of the total adult population. The results are based on representative surveys of more than 260,000 adults in 135 countries or territories between 2007 and 2009. The higher the resulting positive index value, the larger the potential net gain in adult population.
Singapore scored way ahead of the other places surveyed. The results, if translated into reality, would see Singapore’s adult population increase from an estimated 3.6 million to up to 13 million, because those who are there want to stay and many others want to relocate there permanently. At the bottom is the Congo, where 60 per cent of the people would leave if they could and no one wanted to relocate there. Israel, Thailand, South Korea and Tajikistan came out even, with no potential net loss or gain. Thirty-two locations, including Singapore, had more people wanting to relocate there than leave. Mainland China, at 41st, had an overall net loss of 5 per cent of the total population.
What should be shocking to the Hong Kong government is the number of people who would leave if they could. Our city ranked 65th out of the 135 jurisdictions on the list. The survey did not ask why people wanted to leave, or relocate, so we are left to speculate.
One reason that certainly drives people away is poor environmental conditions, especially air quality. We know this because a Civic Exchange survey conducted by the Hong Kong Transition Project last year showed that all sectors of society were worried about air pollution, and one in five people surveyed were considering leaving Hong Kong for that reason. Extrapolating these figures, we can assume that up to 1.4 million residents are considering leaving, and 500,000 are seriously considering going or had already planned to relocate. The propensity increased for higher-income earners, the better educated and people in professional, managerial and administrative work. The survey also found that one in 10 people polled had heard of occasions when their employers tried to hire someone from overseas who turned down the job because of air pollution.
The survey concluded that there was a potentially large and extremely damaging risk of Hong Kong losing a significant number of its best-trained people if it could not clean up the air in the foreseeable future.
When the survey was released, in December 2008, it was greeted with disbelief – how could it be that up to half a million Hong Kong residents may be actively considering leaving town? It was hard to answer. Yet, it should have been a wake-up call; there was discontent in the community.
The survey prompted the government to conduct its own polls, which showed air pollution to be a much bigger concern than officials had thought.
The Gallup and Civic Exchange surveys point in the same direction: there is a large pool of unhappy people in Hong Kong who want to leave. Gallup’s findings reflect people’s aspirations rather than their intentions. Civic Exchange’s results discovered those who were seriously considering and planning to leave. In both cases, leaders should reflect upon the implications of what could happen if desires and plans became reality.
Government surveys pinpoint many local concerns. Besides air pollution, poor education and weak health care provisions regularly top the list. Officials argue that they are trying to address these and other problems, but is Hong Kong reaching a dangerous tipping point? We must not shy away from the question.
