Hong Kong residents fleeing their home amid China’s crackdown may soon have a new place to settle: in the Irish countryside.
Ivan Ko, founder of the Victoria Harbor Autonomous City Investment Company, formulated a plan to build a new Hong Kong-inspired city to house migrants near Dublin Airport. The new city of Ko, which he told The Guardian to be called Nextpolis, would house 50,000 former Hong Kong residents in a 50 square kilometer (31.07 square mile) site located between Dublin and Belfast, complete with Cantonese-speaking schools.
“We like Ireland,” Ko told Rory Carroll of The Guardian. “Corporate taxes are very low. It has very strong manufacturing and biomedical companies. The major tech giants have European headquarters there. Overall, we think Ireland is very good.”
Ko had originally planned a 500,000-person Nextpolis that would be semi-autonomous like his native Hong Kong, but abandoned that aspect of the plan after consulting with the Irish government as of December 2019, according to The Guardian. A spokesman for the Irish Department of Foreign Services told The Guardian that Irish officials had had limited contact with Ko’s team “to provide useful and realistic guidance on Ireland.”
Hong Kong is dealing with an uncertain future
Pro-democracy protesters set fire to a barricade at a demonstration in the Causeway Bay District on October 6, 2019 in Hong Kong, China.
Anthony Kwan / Getty Images
Hong Kong has been plagued by the unrest since mass protests erupted over an extradition bill in March 2019, and then transformed to oppose new national security laws criminalizing dissent, Business Insider previously reported. City residents are expected to migrate in large numbers as China continues to tighten its grip on the former British colony with little regard for western convictions.
Both the UK and Australia have established special immigration provisions for Hong Kong residents seeking to relocate, according to Fox News, and the proposed Nextpolis location would allow immigrants to live in Belfast and take advantage of the UK’s path to citizenship to selected Hong Kong people.
“We are in search of freedom and democracy, which is a bit similar to the pilgrims and puritans who left Europe in search of religious freedom,” Ko said when describing the project in his podcast, according to The Guardian.
