By Hazel Parry Jan 25, 2012, 6:28 GMT
Hong Kong - When Peking University professor Kong Qingdong called Hong Kong people 'bastards,' 'thieves' and 'dogs of British imperialists,' he might have known people proud of the wealthy former colony would bite back.
They snapped back with venom, scores of them protesting Sunday outside the Beijing Liaison Office in Hong Kong. Many brought along their pets and some shouted that they would rather be 'a dog in Hong Kong than a human in China.'
The angry spat erupted after video went viral across China of a mainland woman being told off by Hong Kong passengers for eating on the city's squeaky clean subway network, sparking the Beijing academic's vitriolic rant in a television interview.
It might seem a trivial piece of cross-border bitching, but the war of words underlined growing tensions between Hong Kong people and their big brother to the north in the run-up to the 15th anniversary in July of the territory's return to Chinese sovereignty.
Just a fortnight before Sunday's canine-themed protest, more than 1,000 people demonstrated outside Dolce and Gabbana in Hong Kong after security guards ruled that only mainland Chinese customers could take photographs outside the store.
Hong Kong people were furious at what they saw as their second-class citizen treatment in favour of moneyed shoppers from mainland China. Further protests continued outside the store until the Italian fashion chain backed down and apologized.
More significantly still, a survey in December found the ratio of people in Hong Kong who consider themselves Hong Kongers rather than Chinese is growing, reversing a trend towards 'Chineseness' that has been encouraged by the territory's Beijing-appointed government since 1997.
Robert Chung, head of the University of Hong Kong team that conducted the survey, said the findings were surprising given China's phenomenal economic success. 'It must be due to factors beyond economic development,' he concluded.
Those factors appeared plentiful, not least the sometimes overwhelming number of mainland Chinese people flocking over the border into Hong Kong since cross-border travel restrictions were substantially eased from 2003.
When the floodgates were first opened, better-off shoppers from mainland China were welcomed with open arms and credited with saving Hong Kong's economy by bringing much needed spending to the city after the devastating outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.
It wasn't only shoppers who poured in, however. Pregnant mothers also crossed the border in vast numbers to give birth in Hong Kong public hospitals, guaranteeing their children citizenship in the city with advanced education and social welfare systems.
Despite efforts by the Hong Kong government to restrict the flow, babies born to mothers from mainland China account for about 40,000 births a year in Hong Kong, about 45 per cent of the city's total.
Hong Kong's seemingly impressive tourist arrival numbers, which hit a record high in 2011 and have shot up almost every year for the past decade, are made up largely of mainland visitors, who accounted for 28 million of 2011's 42 million arrivals.
Many Hong Kong people expressing their opinions at recent protests said they believe the border has been opened too wide and that mainland Chinese are taking advantage of the city's limited amenities, including its health services, at their expense.
By contrast, Kong appeared to have voiced the views of many mainland Chinese, who see Hong Kongers as uppity and condescending, clinging to outdated colonial prejudices against people from the north of the border as uncultured country cousins.
Paul Yip, population expert at the University of Hong Kong, said he believes the protests were held not because of antipathy towards mainland Chinese but more due to the growing rich-poor divide and sense of unfairness in Hong Kong itself.
Most Hong Kong people have become poorer in the past decade because of policies favoring big businesses and property developers and mainland Chinese people are bearing the brunt of that frustration, Yip argued.
'People in Hong Kong are fed up,' Yip said. 'They have put up with so much hardship and hopelessness in recent years.
'Rent has gone up. Prices have gone up. Everything has gone up except people's salaries. The only people earning more money are the top 10 per cent of the population. The other 90 per cent are suffering.'
Easing that social disquiet - and forging better relations between Hong Kong people and their neighbours to the north - might prove a key challenge for the administration of the restive former British colony in the Year of the Dragon.
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