Hong Kong still socially divided

Despite 1997 handover to China, different cultural orientation creates gap between Hong Kongers and mainlanders


One night in the autumn of 2010, a pregnant woman called the hotline of the New Home Association (NHA).

She was out on the street after a violent fight with her husband. Both of them were from China who came to Hong Kong to build a family.

“She called us and asked, what can she do?” Chan Yee-fei tells AsiaNews. Chan is the head of service of NHA, a non-profit organization that provides professional social services to new arrivals from the mainland.

In no time, they found out that the woman was on a visitor pass while her husband was a permanent resident. “Actually both of them were our recipients,” Chan explains. “But the wife was just a visitor so what can the police do? What can the Hong Kong government do? Who can intervene?”

The woman’s husband first came to Hong Kong while in his 20s in 2000.

He worked as a technician in China but when he arrived in Hong Kong, he lacked the skills to land a better job. So he ended up working in a restaurant but life was not easy for him. When he reached his 30s, he thought of getting married and found a wife in the mainland. But under Hong Kong laws, his wife had to wait for four years before she could join him as a resident. In the meantime, she gave birth to their first-born. Her husband then asked her to come to Hong Kong to take care of the child. It was during this time that he accidentally fell off the balcony of their apartment.

The injury had him confined at the hospital for some time and when he was finally discharged, he could not find a job.

The domestic violence started just as the wife became pregnant with their second child. It was during one of those fights that she thought of calling the NHA hotline.

NHA’s social workers helped the couple through counseling and teaching the man new skills. Today, the couple has settled in Hong Kong but many like them are not as lucky.

Chan notes that NHA has handled different cases including divorce and, worse, suicide because these mainlanders who arrive in Hong Kong with dreams of a better life end up disappointed. It is not only the new arrivals that NHA helps but even those who are just about to move to Hong Kong. They provide information about Hong Kong, its customs, laws and culture so that those from China will not face difficulties adjusting to their new lives.

“Different periods of time have witnessed different people coming to Hong Kong for different reasons,” says Professor Joe Leung Cho Bun of the University of Hong Kong social sciences department.

“Hong Kong is a city of migrants, with different backgrounds and different purposes and issues.”

He notes that before 1952, people from China were free to go through the Hong Kong border. “Those who came before 1952 were educated, some of them had capital, they came here because they feared the communist rule. Then after the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘80s, there were refugees.

“They had to swim rivers, climb mountains and they were treated as illegal refugees. They were young and poorly educated. They came to Hong Kong to escape hunger, particularly during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.”

Most of these migrants, Leung says, provided essential labor for Hong Kong to take off in the 1970s.

“In the ‘70s, Hong Kong was the factory of the world.”

In 1997, Hong Kong was reintegrated with China but the gap between the two has become wider instead of narrowing in the past 15 years.

Earlier this year, there were a couple of cases that highlighted the growing tension between Hong Kong and Chinese residents. One involved a video uploaded on social networking sites showing a Hong Kong local stopping a girl from China from eating on the subway.

Another video, later removed from YouTube because it violated the site’s policy, showed Peking University professor Kong Qingdong criticizing Hong Kong people.

Grumblings continued on how mainlanders were getting better treatment at department stores in Hong Kong, pushing up real property prices, giving birth in local hospitals and taking jobs away from residents.

The issue of identity also became stronger with a University of Hong Kong poll released in June showing that 8.11 percent identified themselves as Hong Kong residents while 7.26 percent categorised themselves as Chinese. The survey also showed the loss of trust among Hong Kongers with the Chinese government.

This mistrust became even more pronounced earlier this month when Hong Kong students and supporters launched a huge protest against the introduction of national education classes in local schools. They believed that this was part of Beijing’s attempt to “brainwash” them. The Hong Kong government has since backed down with chief executive Leung Chun Ying revoking a 2015 deadline for schools to implement the plan.

Professor Leung says the identity poll “reflects the situation and dilemma that Hong Kong people face” and how they see China.

“They’re afraid that Hong Kong is becoming increasingly part of China and the obvious presence of the Chinese has become a threat to their status and identity. This means that they are no longer superior so this gives people mixed feelings especially when the international environment portrays China as very aggressive,” Leung explains.

For social workers like Chan and his colleagues at NHA, it is just a matter of bridging the cultural and social gap between Hong Kongers and mainlanders.

Chan acknowledges the different cultural orientation as a root of the problem. “You can’t change habits overnight. But through more information and training, there can be social harmony.”

By Yasmin Lee Arpon

(Asia News Network)