By early July, it emerged that there was a list, with more than 50 names, of people feet to be doing very little in return for their comfortable packages. They were called into Professor Smallman's temporary office, one by one, to discuss how they saw their future at the University of Hong Kong. For those who could not see a future involving a lot more research and publication than they had been doing in the past, packages were offered to ease the pain of departure. So good were the packages, one Australian academic who resigned just before Professor Smallman's arrival asked if he could 'unresign' and take forcible retirement complete with package instead. However, others - especially those too young to see themselves gliding comfortably into retirement on packages worth, in some cases, millions of Hong Kong dollars - decided to stick it out.
"Why do you think I'm still in my office after five in the middle of the summer break?" asked a history lecturer when I called, who was on the list but had decided to tough it out. "I'm finishing a paper."
However, the change affected more than those who had been coasting along. Professor Branicki, who by any standards tops the ratings, found on his return that the best he could expect was a two-year contract. Two years ago, that didn't seem to matter. Most such contracts were almost automatically extended in the past. But now, one year after the handover, a two-year contract for a foreign worker is Exactly what it says. So for Professor Branicki, it is a choice of either packing up his family and moving on, or trying to make it in Hong Kong's private sector.
Others too, although offered extra years on their contract, have found that the brills have been trimmed. No housing, no school deals, no plane trips home, have made the expatriates long again for the greener, less crowded, less relentless cities they came from.
Many in the civil service, the utility companies and the large public companies, once automatically looking at head of department, or general manager's jobs after a few years, know they will stay where they are, doing quite well, but not well enough. Even the most talented and hardworking expatriates cannot hope to reach the top in civil service departments, because nationality and ethnicity rules mean only Hong Kong Chinese considered Chinese nationals can now take these jobs. So the jobs once reserved exclusively for expats are now equally exclusively reserved for people considered 'locals'.
This situation, which is part of Britain's agreed decolonization of Hong Kong, seemed fair enough when the agreements were hammered out in the 1980s, Harris said.
