My Take | For protest offenders, no foreign white knights to the rescue

Hong Kong protesters and rioters must be incredibly naive to think Taiwan and Britain will offer them political asylum or full residency. For President Tsai Ing-wen, calling them “friends of Taiwan” and dangling the possibility of their admission on humanitarian grounds is cynical politics at its worst.

For some British members of parliament, including Lord Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, it’s virtue signalling at its most pathetic. There is a snowball’s chance in hell for that to happen, and all those Very Important People in parliament know it. But as Patten once wrote, British honour is at stake. You don’t say, my Lord. That was actually out the window back in 1997. Or was it 1984?

Even the British government must realise an initial plan to call on other Commonwealth countries to accept Hong Kong people as “political refugees” is too absurd and hypocritical. More recently, close to 130 members of parliament wrote to their government to consider granting British citizenship to holders of BNO passports in Hong Kong.

Beijing angrily dismissed the initiative as the product of Western colonial mentality. It seems to me to be more the result of residual postcolonial guilt. But we are talking about possibly 3 million Hong Kong migrants.

I bet not a single one of those MPs thinks that any British government, Tory, Labour or what not, would go for it. Those virtue signallers just want to jump on their high horses. And in the case of Patten and his other anti-China pals in parliament, it helps strengthen the false narrative of political repression against pro-democracy activists, rather than law enforcement against rioters.

Whoever wins in the January presidential election in Taiwan or whichever party will dominate the Legislative Yuan, no serious legislative effort will be made to introduce such a law.