Emigration from Hong Kong will leap almost 50 percent this year because of fears of Communist China's takeover in 1997, the British colonial government announced Monday.
The government said 62,000 people are expected to leave the territory in 1990, compared with 42,000 last year, an increase of 47.6 percent.Mike Rowse, head of a government task force on emigration, predicted about 60,000 people a year - or 1,150 people a week - would leave the colony in 1991 and 1992.
Some analysts say emigration from Hong Kong will skyrocket after 1992, five years before China resumes control of the colony and the year China's controversial Daya Bay nuclear power plant is scheduled to come on stream 30 miles north of Hong Kong.
Reports of numerous construction problems have dogged the plant, causing worries about its safety.
Rowse said most of the people leaving are members of Hong Kong's vibrant, well-educated middle class, who have turned this 410-square-mile patch of islands and peninsula on the southern Chinese coast into an economic powerhouse.
Their departure has sparked fears of economic and social problems in Hong Kong once China resumes control of the territory in 1997.
Interest in emigration has increased since China cracked down on a movement for freedom in Beijing in June 1989. The crackdown convinced many in the territory that China could easily break its promise to maintain the colony's freewheeling economic and social system for 50 years.
London's refusal to give most of its Hong Kong colonial subjects the right to live in Britain also played a role in encouraging emigration. The British government has recently approved a package that will give about 225,000 of Hong Kong's 5.7 million people the right of abode in Britain.
Only certain individuals, such as senior civil servants, top businessmen, educators and highly-skilled workers, qualify.
Rowse said applications for the package would begin to be acted on in November and that the first passports under the plan would be issued by spring.
But, he said, the government has no way to predict whether people who receive the passports will stay, as the plan intends, or leave immediately for Britain.