Living Together In The Locust World
Well, this has been on the edges of my radar for a while but I’ve only just started paying serious attention. It seems the tension has been slowly rising between Hong Kong residents in the former British colony and mainland Chinese tourists.
I lived in HK for a few years in the late 90s and I know at that time, Hongkongers looked down on mainland visitors, feeling themselves far superior and frowning on the mainlanders bad habits, such as being very loud, throwing rubbish on the floor and spitting and urinating in the streets. But I genuinely thought that was in the past because HK now relies heavily on tourism specifically from mainland visitors to support the economy. Walk in to any luxury store in HK and the sales assistants will be fawning all over you if you’re from the mainland. Hong Kong residents get asked to stand to one side while the big spending mainlanders get served.
But there have been several news items recently that have shown that nothing has really changed, it’s all just been simmering below the surface. Firstly there’s the Locust World song which viciously attacks mainland Chinese habits such as “shouting, screaming, yelling”, “smoking like breathing in hell”, “and then their children defecate all over the floor”. (They’re comparing mainland tourists to those irritating and annoying insects). The song goes on talk about cheating and scamming, pregnant mainland women sneaking across the border to have their children in HK to get the HK ID card, and so on.
Not surprisingly this has infuriated many mainlanders and increased the tension.
A good example of some of the tension being unleashed can be seen in this recent incident on Hong Kong’s subway where eating and drinking is not permitted. It seems some mainland visitors were either unaware or deliberately ignored this rule and then a fight broke out after one enraged HK man and his girlfriend tried to tell the hungry mainlanders to stop eating and making a mess.
I suppose I need to tread carefully here. When I started my blog many years ago, much of what I was writing reflected many of the frustrations of the Hong Kong people. But on the other hand, the bad behaviour is by now means universal and I know many Chinese people who are equally appalled by the bad behaviour of their compatriots both at home and abroad. And just last weekend I was having a lovely dim sum lunch in a very up market Cantonese restaurant. The meal was spoiled only by the neighboring table who were smoking incessantly – two men and one woman, all unmistakably from Hong Kong!
But I do understand the irritation that many Hong Kong residents feel. It must be annoying for example, to go to a store to buy infant formula for your baby and find all the milk has been bought by mainlanders who are bring the milk back to mainland China to sell for a profit.
Let’s hope things calm down soon.
(Apologies to those inside China without a VPN, you won’t be able to view the video clips from YouTube).








