Hong Kong and the Mainland

Dogs and locusts

Old divisions find a new expression

Feb 4th 2012 | HONG KONG | from the print edition

DESPITE a plethora of festive new-year dragons and a few days of holiday, it has been a season of ill will in Hong Kong. On January 15th a young Mandarin-speaking girl dropped some dried noodles she had been nibbling on a Hong Kong underground train. Perhaps her family, from mainland China, did not know that eating and drinking is banned on the spotless metro. When a local Cantonese speaker objected to the noodle-eating in bad Mandarin, a quarrel erupted. The whole incident, recorded on a mobile phone, was soon viewed online by millions in Hong Kong and in China.

"That's what mainlanders are like," was perhaps the nastiest thing said by any Hong Konger in the metro carriage. But soon a well-known loudmouth professor at Peking University was suggesting that some in the former colony were "British running dogs". This caused some Hong Kongers to take to the streets to protest. On February 1st another group took out a full-page advertisement in a Hong Kong newspaper complaining about mainland "locusts" swarming into the territory; it called for the government to stop the "infiltration".

In the past two months Hong Kong has seen a spate of related protests: one against the thousands of expectant mothers who pour in from the mainland to give birth in local hospitals; another involving a march against Dolce & Gabbana, a prominent Italian retailer, when it was thought to be favouring shoppers from the mainland. Though Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, a border still runs between the territory and mainland China, and access from the mainland is restricted. The Hong Kongers' broad complaint is longstanding: they see hordes of mainlanders putting a strain on public resources. Mainlanders in turn feel that Hong Kongers are arrogant and disloyal to the motherland.

What has changed drastically in the past few years is that the old fear of poor mainland Chinese swamping Hong Kong has been washed away by floods of rich mainland shoppers. Where onceHong Kongers disdained their countrymen from the mainland as Ah Chan, the derisory term for a bumpkin, they are now more likely to hear themselves disparaged asKong Chan, Hong Kong bumpkins, by mainlanders flush with cash
.