Hong Kong anger at Chinese ‘locust’ shoppers intensifies

Hong Kong anger at Chinese ‘locust’ shoppers intensifies

Feb 2015

By Amie Tsang in Hong Kong

Protesters wearing masks shout at mainland Chinese shoppers

 

They are known in Hong Kong as “locusts”, the visitors from the Chinese mainland who converge in their millions on the territory to stock up on everything from jewellery to milk powder.
Local residents have long complained that the shoppers clog up public transport and crowd out stores. But that long-simmering resentment is increasingly boiling over into angry protests.
Police on Sunday arrested six men at a demonstration in a suburban shopping mall in Sha Tin, which sits alongside a rail line connecting Hong Kong to the mainland. 

One protester waved a colonial-era flag and others yelled at shoppers to go home.
Expressions of anger against mainlanders are not uncommon. 

But they appear to have received a boost from last year’s mass Occupy protests against government plans for electoral reform, which brought Hong Kong to a standstill.
Demonstrators there regularly expressed disquiet over efforts by the authorities to make Hong Kong more like China. 

In some cases, that anger now appears to have transformed into antagonism towards the visitors, whose numbers have increased massively since the introduction of multiple entry visas in 2009.
“It’s been festering since Occupy,” says James Bang, who volunteered at supply tents in last year’s protest sites and has observed some of the recent demonstrations. 

“It is quite ugly . . . [The demonstrators] are not racist, horrible people but they feel like they’ve been ignored and trampled on and had their country taken away from them.”
Junius Ho, a district councillor for Tuen Mun in the New Territories, says he understands the anger.
He points out that while in 2003 mainland visitors only numbered in the thousands, last year there were nearly 50m — a huge number for a territory with a population of just over 7m people to absorb.
“In the past 11 years there has been an alarming increase,” he says.
Hong Kong residents complain that many of the visitors are so-called “parallel traders” who come to the territory to buy goods cheaply and then resell them at a higher price on the mainland. 

There is also frustration that many shops appear to be increasingly focused on mainland consumers, to the detriment of locals.
Nearly 2,000 mainlanders involved in parallel trading have been arrested since September 2012 for being illegally employed.
But Mr Ho thinks Hong Kong cannot afford to turn away visitors who spend an average of HK$8,000 (US$1,000) on each visit.
“Why are we finding mainland travellers repugnant? Are we creating a reverse bamboo curtain? That is incredible and unbelievable,” he says.
While he is open to restricting the number of visits that mainland residents can make on their visas, he thinks it is more practical to work on improving Hong Kong’s infrastructure to help it cope with the crowds flowing in.
He is not the only one uneasy about the tone of recent protests.
Alan, a sales executive who saw the protests in Sha Tin on Sunday, says: “Some of the slogans were uncomfortable, in the sense they were quite abusive not just to smugglers but to random tourists, people with kids, anyone really.”
James Bang says opinion is divided and many people who were involved with the Occupy movement have qualms about the recent anti-mainlander protests. 

“Some say it’s hurting the movement. They don’t like the way that people are shouting at mainland tourists . . . Everyone’s just a little lost.”