Giving Birth in HK
by Sean on Jan.15, 2012, under China
Recently, an article passed through my Google Reader app which reminded me of an interesting lesson I learned while living in China. I was in Shenzhen with my gf at the time, and we were crossing into Hong Kong. It was in the morning, and we saw groups of children lining up at the border to go into Hong Kong. It was clear that there were mainland Chinese sending their children across every day to be educated in Hong Kong. I asked my gf what was going on. She said that these children had all been born in Hong Kong to Mainland Chinese parents.
Apparently, this made the citizens of Hong Kong angry. What has been happening for a long time is that the parents would get a visa for HK, and pay an agent around $25,000 to secure a hospital bed so that when the time came, the parents could cross into HK and give birth. Because they were born in Hong Kong, they had a HK passport, citizenship, and full rights to a great education. The reasons Mainland parents would go through this trouble are many:
- Holding a HK passport (over a mainland passport) gives them access to travel to 100 or more countries visa-free. Mainlanders must jump through flaming hoops to get a visa for any country
- Mainlanders believe that the HK education system is far more superior, resembling a more Western style in which they respect the creativity and independence of each student.
- The healthcare system is believed to be far superior
- Most HK citizens can speak English and Cantonese, whereas most Mainland citizens can only speak Mandarin and their local dialect.
Here’s where the Hong Kong citizens take issue with this practice. If you have 30,000 children being born within your borders each year to non-residents, it severely limits hospitals from being able to properly support its citizens. In addition, a black market for finding hospital beds has been created which pits private agents against their own brethren. The amount of money they can ask for is insanely high for many Chinese, and so these agents are getting rich off the blood, sweat, and tears of the Mainland Chinese.
The entire practice has enraged the locals, because it’s difficult for them to find hospital beds when it comes time for them to give birth. They protested, and finally the government responded by severely limiting the number of beds that mainland parents can have access to. Something that was included in the response which infuriated some locals was that this law included couples where the mother was from the Mainland and legally living in HK with her HK citizen husband. That meant many of them had to return to the Mainland to give birth, which also meant that they would have to live in the Mainland with their child (and have the child go to school in the Mainland), whilst the father worked and lived in Hong Kong.
The lesson to be learned here is that governments should pay more attention to the needs of their citizens, rather than creating blanket laws that generalize, and even harm the lives of future generations!
Please continue on to read this article for more information on the situation!
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