Oh, this has been an issue for a long time. Mainland tourists have brought a great deal of business to Hong Kong, but there's quite a bit of animosity towards them. Here's an op-ed piece from the SCMP from 2012:
Imagine that the entire US population of 314 million can suddenly reach Manhattan in an hour or so by train, ferry or bus. They start streaming in by the millions with minimum immigration controls. The visitors - with different habits and a different dialect from the locals - buy up everything, from property and iPhones to daily necessities. They overwhelm the city's transport system, shops, streets and even campsites. Some shopping districts are virtually colonised. Squeezed out of their own city, the locals fight back.
Anyone who sees the Hong Kong backlash against the flood of mainlanders in any other way is missing the point. Nearly 300 million mainlanders now qualify for easy entry to Hong Kong. The backlash you're seeing - the mocking of mainlanders as locusts, the waving of British flags, and the fury over parallel goods traders - stems not from jealousy or loathing of mainlanders. It's an overdue eruption of fear and frustration that has festered for too long.
Don't confuse a fear of "mainlandisation" with a yearning for "de-Sinofication" or colonial days. That fear came to the fore when Beijing liaison official Li Gang overshadowed Leung Chun-ying at a hospital after the ferry tragedy. Why else would Hongkongers wonder who was really in charge here?
Quality of life suffers when an overcrowded city with an overstretched infrastructure has to, with no preparation, accommodate a "floating" population of extra millions. Ordinary people suffer when mainlanders buy up almost a quarter of Hong Kong homes. Resentment builds when property tycoons give the visitors priority and when even HSBC switches to simplified characters in some branches. This all breeds frustration, which leads to anger, which then explodes at times. Anyone who can't see this or sees it as "de-Sinofication" must have a poor grasp of the public mood.
Frankly, I am surprised at how many minds are muddled. Even Leung seems to have missed the point in his National Day speech. Of course it is essential and inevitable for Hong Kong to integrate with the mainland as he stressed. Hongkongers know that. But do you integrate by sending over a flood as happened in Tibet? Or do you do it in a sustainable and orderly way?
We need to look at the big picture but also see the little things, like tripping over the trolleys of parallel goods traders who rush to cross the Lo Wu checkpoint, missing MTR trains because mainland visitors block escalators with oversized luggage, having to wait for three trains before being able to board, and the mainland unnecessarily sending salvage boats to aid in the ferry collision rescue.
None of this is a big deal on its own, but it adds up to a ticking time bomb. Every Hongkonger I've asked has expressed frustration. They shake their heads when I ask if they want "de-Sinofication". They just see their city being changed too fast to something they fear. Don't forget most Hongkongers find the mainland system totally at odds with their own core values. We can acknowledge we have a potentially explosive situation or we can fool ourselves that it's just the growing pains of integration.
http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opi ... rustrationThen there's the rising cost of housing, with estimates of 25% of the housing in Hong Kong owned by mainland Chinese.
Chong says people want real democratic representation to address real-world problems, such as Hong Kong's crushing housing prices. He uses the tent he's sitting under — an area the size of a bedroom — to illustrate some of the city's extremes.
"This area, it can cost you HK$2 million," he said, the equivalent of $260,000 in the U.S. "So I think that is too crazy. ... We can't accept that kind of price."
Chong, who used to work as a real estate agent, says one reason prices are so high — and are about double what they were in 2007 — is that newly rich mainlanders snap up apartments as investments, and often raise eyebrows by making down payments with bags of cash.
"No Hong Kong people, no one would do things like that," says Chong, who now works as a nurse and provided medical care to protesters. "If our government do not stop it, we have no power to compete with them for our house."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014 ... s-protestsOr the fact that the landscape of Hong Kong is changing as small shops close up and LV and Armani shops open up in their place.
“The Chinese people coming to Hong Kong. Their culture is different. They go to the toilet in the streets,” says Arthur Pang, 44, standing on the edge of a group of protesters listening to speeches in Mong Kok, one of the movement’s three protest sites. Motioning to Nathan Road, a shopping street that the protesters have blocked with tents and makeshift barricades, he says, “There used to be little shops. Now it is all drug stores and jewelry shops. It’s a shopping mall for mainlanders.” His wife, standing next to him, leans over and says: “I doubt whether we are still in Hong Kong sometimes.”
http://qz.com/290228/the-uglier-side-of ... t-chinese/It's putting a real strain on the city's resources and transforming it.
- Click image to enlarge.
Tension between Hong Kongers and mainlanders has simmered ever since the former British colony’s return to China in 1997. For every Hong Konger who sees mainlanders as rude and uncouth, there is a mainlander who sees Hong Kongers as arrogant and bitter that their once-poor cousins to the north are now growing prosperous.
In 2007, China’s then-president Hu Jintao called for a new generation of Hong Kongers who love China.
But that generation never arrived. Over the last five years as Chinese tourists and immigrants to the city have grown exponentially, frustration toward mainlanders boils over more often—an average of 380 tour groups from China visited the city per day since the beginning of October.” Spot the mainlander” is something of a past time among some bloggers. Mainland Chinese have earned their own derogatory slur in Cantonese, wong chung, or “locusts” that critics say are ravaging Hong Kong. The term is also the subject of one popular satirical song, “Locust World” in which a man croons, “Invading across the Hong Kong border and taking our land, that’s your specialty..Locust Nation.”
Heated confrontations and physical fights are becoming more common—in February a group of protesters taunted Chinese shoppers, calling them them wong chung and shi na, a racial slur used to refer to the Chinese during World War II. Hong Kong protesters at a train station near the Chinese border in 2012 held up a sign that said “Chinese people eat shit,” prompting mainland Chinese travelers to attack them. Footage of a Chinese couple and a local wrestling over a memory card containing footage of the parents letting their son urinate on a sidewalk went viral this spring, leading Chinese netizens to declare a boycott of Hong Kong.
“Many Chinese students, we are fed up with the CCP. We understand their anger.”
Daily life in Hong Kong is at times uncomfortable for mainlanders living here. “My friends used to just stay three or four years, and then go back to China. I didn’t understand why until after I started working,” says Anika Wong, a 25-year-old English teacher, originally from Tianjin. Working and living away from home is already difficult enough. She’s not sure whether she has imagined or experienced discrimination in her three years here—a group of locals speaking in Cantonese near her suddenly bursting out in laughter or a rude waiter. “You get used to it,” she says.
Not all Hong Kong appear to have much sympathy for those who feel discriminated against: in a poll done by the South China Morning Post, 83% of those surveyed said no to the idea of outlawing discrimination based on immigration status or nationality—mainland Chinese are not covered by a Hong Kong law against discrimination and harassment of a person based on their race or ethnic origin.
The people in your picture were accused of being parallel traders, something that's actually illegal in Hong Kong but is carried out quite frequently anyway. Mainland Chinese buy up goods in Hong Kong, driving up the scarcity, then take them into mainland China and sell them off.
A magistrate at Fanling Court yesterday lashed out at parallel traders who smuggle baby formula across the border, before sentencing one of them to two weeks in jail. Principal Magistrate Bernadette Woo Huey Fang said the smuggling situation had "spiralled out of control".
She called the problem "unprecedented" and "shocking" and said that not only had the number of cases jumped, the quantity of materials involved had also skyrocketed.
Woo delivered her strongly worded comments minutes before she sentenced a clerk from mainland China to jail. The clerk, Wu Mingying, 30, admitted to sneaking 20.1kg of formula across the border at the Lok Ma Chau immigration checkpoint.
The amount of formula she carried was almost 12 times the 1.8kg limit, known as the two-tin rule, which the Hong Kong government introduced in 2013.
According to the Customs and Excise Department, 7,638 people have been convicted for smuggling formula since 2013, with some 45,500kg of the substance confiscated. Of those convicted, just 69 have been jailed.
The magistrate, who heard 24 similar cases yesterday, said the incidents were on the rise from fewer than 3,000 in 2013 to some 5,000 last year.
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/ ... judge-saysOf course, the local shopkeepers don't have a problem with it. Money is one of the gods of Hong Kong, after all.
A tin of chicken bouillon powder sells for HK$15 ($1.94; £1.14).
A sign displaying the price also states each tin can be sold across the border in the mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen for HK$17, for a profit of HK$2.
On a recent weekend, a steady stream of buyers from mainland China, called parallel traders, crowded around the shops to purchase boxes of chicken powder and other items, including toothpaste and red wine, to sell for profit back home.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28093730Still, these parallel traders don't deserve this kind of abuse. They're out to make a buck, just like everyone else, and for now, it's profitable to keep doing what they're doing, no matter how angry local Hong Kong people get over the practice.
) and had dinner with a couple of my old classmates one night. The HK guys were incredibly sniffy about mainlanders - even the guy who is actually a mainlander himself, but just happens to have grown up in HK. The way they talked it's like they come from a different country (one which they apparently feel is vastly superior).
