In LA

Several people have asked me how a trip to Hong Kong can be considered leaving the country of China when everyone knows that Hong Kong is part of China. The answer is that Hong Kong is indeed now part of China, but it is also somewhat autonomous. It is less socialist than the mainland, with more press freedom, has an apparently uncensored internet, features fewer men spitting and hacking in the street, and will remain this way for at least the next 50 years.

To be extra-precise, I didn’t visit the country of Hong Kong, but visited the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China”. So it is a region of China, but has its own currency, passports, policies (no one-child policy, the HKSAR government encourages its citizens to have 3 kids), and is separate enough from the mainland that a trip to Hong Kong is considered to be leaving the country of China.

On this trip, I travelled to two regions of China that have recently been returned to China: Hong Kong and Macau. At each border I had to fill out departure and entry paperwork and get my passport stamped. To the right you can see the page from my passport that features all the stamps related to this journey. It seemed a lot of bother waiting in lines at customs at each border since technically all of these places are now part of China again, but even more technically speaking, they’re not part of China. Something like that.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 8:51 am and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.