IN RECENT years, the Government has usually sought to pretend that those 'political troublemakers' - in other words, anyone disliked by Beijing - whom it refused to allow into Hong Kong had problems with their passports and visas, or some other genuinely immigration-related reason for being denied entry.
Two years ago, for instance, Chinese dissident Xiang Xiaoji waltzed into the SAR to attend a June 4 gathering, while Tiananmen Square student-leader Wang Dan and essentially all the other overseas activists who had also wanted to attend were not allowed to do so.
Mr Xiang was the only one of the activists to hold a United States passport. So unlike his colleagues, he did not need to apply for a visa in advance - the refusal of which is always a favourite way of quietly denying entry to anyone who might anger Beijing by their presence in Hong Kong. And, at that stage, the Government was evidently unwilling to take the more extreme step of simply turning him away when he arrived unannounced at the airport, as that would have shattered the pretence that its entry policy was based on immigration considerations rather than political ones.
But last week, it abandoned any attempt to continue this increasingly threadbare charade as about 100 Falun Gong followers were denied entry, even though nearly all of them held valid visas or were from countries whose nationals are not required to have them.
Indeed, what was striking about last week's transparent attempt to avoid embarrassing President Jiang Zemin during his presence at the Fortune Global Forum was how little effort was made to pretend there was anything wrong with the travel documents of those turned back. Instead, many of the Falun Gong followers reported being told something close to the truth - namely, that they were being denied entry for 'security reasons'.
No wonder so many foreign governments expressed concern through their local consulates at what the US called such apparently 'arbitrary' expulsions. After all, in stark contrast to Hong Kong's much-vaunted policy of granting visa-free access to nationals of more than 150 countries, it now seems that even possession of a visa is unlikely to be enough to secure entry - if you happen to have the wrong political or religious beliefs.