I recently boarded an MTR train to visit a friend who is a successful potter. Along the way there I spotted several behaviors that most would find inconsiderate. There were couples leaning on handrails, men sitting down with their legs crossed obstructing standing room, commuters who refuse to put their backpacks on the ground, and women on their phones watching sensational videos on full volume.
After taking all of these observations in, I thought to myself: “People in Hong Kong are this rude? How dare they criticize the Mainland Chinese for being inconsiderate!” Then of course, this shouldn’t be about what-aboutisms, it should be about the Golden Rule.Recently, there has been a lot of negative sentiment towards Mainland Chinese visitors and immigrants to Hong Kong, especially after the completion of the mega bridge and the new High-speed rail terminal.
Any immigrant community like Hong Kong, the Americas, and Oceania, consists of a relatively low proportion of indigenous people. When we take up the whole population of the community into consideration we realize that most everyone is a descendant of an immigrant.Perhaps in Hong Kong’s example the population exploded three generations ago when Mainland Chinese fled the hunger and persecution of the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution seeking a better life in then British Hong Kong.
When my grandfather was born in the early 20th century, Hong Kong had fewer than 500,000 people. By the time he immigrated to the colony after the war it had already grown to over 2 million.Between the time of my father’s birth and my birth, the population had sky rocketed from 3 million in to 1960’s to over 6 million in the 1990’s. Add this to the fact that statistics from Our Hong Kong Foundation indicates that just 70,000 of the current 7.4 million people in Hong Kong have indigenous lineage and we will come to the conclusion that rapid population growth would not be possible without mass migration.
Perhaps Hong Kong’s situation is slightly more curious than that of western colonization. While Europeans went around the world seizing foreign land as their own, enslaving people that they perceived as inferior, and massacred local communities by force or disease, Hong Kong’s ethnically homogenous migration had none of those features. Sure, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Hakka people all have distinct languages, cultures, and food, but all belong to the same ethnic group. When we consider the fact that 92% of Hong Kong’s population is ethnic Han Chinese to America’s native population being less than 1.5% it becomes hard to discriminate between inhabitants by origin or race.
The story of Hong Kong’s success is similar to that of other migrant communities around the world like New York, Singapore, and London. It owes a large part of its success to the diversity of its residents and their skills to create a prosperous meritocratic society. Without this level of mass immigration, the city could not have achieved so much. So why the animosity towards immigrants if the current residents themselves are also descendants of immigrants? Surely, the current population and its successes would not exist if their grandparents or parents had not decided to immigrate.
Perhaps it’s selfish protectionism; the desire to preserve what has been so painstakingly built up in the past several decades to themselves. Maybe it’s an irrational economic fear that further migration will lead to job loss, higher property prices, and a lower quality of life due to overcrowding. Or it could be the conceited thought that theMainland Chinese are somehow less cultures, poorly-mannered, and of a lower social class. But there’s one thing for sure, if the 7,000-odd residents of Hong Kong in 1841 were all there ever was, the fragrant harbor would still be a fishing village.
