"So good were, and still are, the deals, that many of those expat lecturers, attracted by the thought of a couple of years in the exotic East found they had adapted too well to their high incomes, superior social status and managed housing. Jobs back home, even ones with significant academic status, just no longer looked attractive. In the kind of neat inverse relationship some of them taught in mathematics and science, the longer the expat lecturers stayed, the harder it became for them to go anywhere else: But, just as outside forces alter neat sociological/mathematical models, outside social change arrived to destroy the bonds keeping the expat academics clinging to Hong Kong" Harris said.
The first really telling sign was the arrival of a new Vice-Chancellor at the University of Hong Kong, Professor Y.C. Cheng. Professor Cheng was not the first ethnic Chinese Vice-Chancellor at the University of Hong Kong, but his predecessor, Wang Gung-Wu, a historian from the Australian National University, was an urbane internationalist with no particular loyalty to any one sector.
"Professor Cheng, an engineer who had been Vice-Chancellor at City University, one of Hong Kong's newly established universities (set up in part to break Hong Kong University's hold on tertiary education), arrived with a sense of mission. He was determined to trim the territory's oldest university of its thick layer of expat fat. So clear was his dislike of the privilege enjoyed by the expats, known as gweilos (ghost people) in Cantonese slang, Professor Cheng soon became known as 'the Ghostbuster' behind his back."
Some expats took the hint and applied for jobs overseas. Farewells became increasingly common in the three years leading up to June 1997, and the international schools struggled to deal with constantly shifting student populations. But for hundreds of expat academics still at Hong Kong University, the benefits of staying were so great they developed a kind of blinkered vision of the future, believing, because they had to, that all would stay the same.
"It was not until another 'Ghostbuster' - someone far closer to the real thing - appeared on the scene, that serious alarm spread through the expatriate academic community at the University of Hong Kong. This "Ghostbuster', better known as Professor Ray Smallman, an engineer turned academic management consultant from Birmingham University in Britain, arrive, symbolically enough, in June 1997 just before Hong Kong returned to China. And his job, although officially to conduct a review of the university's academic activities with a view to improving the quality of its teaching and research, soon looked more like a brief to clean out the less productive expatriates" Harris wrote.
