1. Introduction
3.5 Increasing Hostile Sentiment towards Mainland Chinese?
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permanent residency, and they are expected to return eventually to their home country. A landmark labor suit, filed by a Filipino domestic helper in 2008 seeking permanent residency in Hong Kong, has struck at the core of the territory's often fraught relationship with its guest workers. However, like in Singapore and Taiwan, these domestic helpers in Hong Kong are now still not eligible for permanent residency.
Table 13: The Numbers of Applying Naturalization and Nationality in Hong Kong
Item 2011 2012
Declaration of change of nationality cases received 152 95 Application for naturalization as a Chinese national
received 1,219 1,274
Application for renunciation of Chinese nationality
received 52 119
Application for restoration of Chinese nationality
received 15 5
Source: http://www.immd.gov.hk/en/facts/naturalisation-nationality.html, accessed on 9 July 2013.
3.5 Increasing Hostile Sentiment towards Mainland Chinese?
Mainland China has been playing an increasingly important role in helping and leading Hong Kong‘s economy. The exchange and convergence between mainland China and Hong Kong are deepening. However, many local people have had hostile and negative sentiment towards mainlanders. The mainland Chinese immigrants are usually viewed as being poor, rural, needy, maladjusted and rude; most Hong Kong people see them as sources of social problems, free riders of welfare and services, and objects to control and regulate. In the late 1970s, 1980s and even the early 1990s, Hong Kong people believed they were better educated, more prosperous than their counterparts in mainland China; while in recent years,
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as many rich mainlanders come to Hong Kong, there is a little bit of inferiority complex.
Understandably, sentiment flared in years of economic downturn and political uncertainty.
Today, public attitudes often reflect the negative view that immigrants are not only different but also are a real and growing social burden. The ―new immigrant‖ label has remained stuck in the minds of many Hong Kong residents, with a sensationalized media focusing attention on the worst cases of family abuse and poverty. The stigma of being a new immigrant was often combined with the stigma of being a welfare recipient, even though under the new regulations the new arrivals are now disqualified from welfare payments in their first seven-years. Since the 1980s new immigrants from the mainland were also excluded from public housing (Smart, 2003).
Some people carried protest signs objecting to the milk product shortage in Hong Kong due to the melamine contaminated milk scandal in mainland China in 2008. They are also dissatisfied with the mainland Chinese women who come to Hong Kong to deliver babies.
There has been a sharp increase in the number of mainland mothers giving birth in Hong Kong in recent years. They have dominated obstetrics services in Hong Kong at the expense of local expecting mothers. Naturally, this gives rise to a lot of anxieties and resentment on the part of local expectant mothers. In addition, debates on the right of abode issue and reactions to an arson attack on a Hong Kong immigration office in 2000 revealed the depth of local hostility towards these new arrivals. In early February 2012, a young mainland girl visiting Hong Kong with her mother was caught eating instant noodles on the subway, where eating is prohibited. Security was called and a very public row ensued. Mainlanders accused locals of bullying, while Hong Kong residents insisted the visitors were rude and paid no heed to hygiene in a densely populated city. After the video was widely shared online, a professor of Sinology at Peking University, Dr. Kong Qingdong, publicly called some Hong Kong people ―British running dogs‖ for looking down on mainlanders, triggering a protest by about 100 residents at the Liaison Office of
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the Central People‘s Government in the HKSAR. The simmering anger erupted in a very public manner, as a group of anonymous Hong Kong residents paid for a full-page advertisement in the Apple Daily, calling on the government to stop the ―unlimited infiltration‖ of mainlanders. A few days later, during an ―anti-locust rally‖, young Hong Kong activists targeted tourists from mainland China in an unusual way, serenading them with an offensive parody song called "Locust World"(蝗蟲天下). The lyrics accuse mainlanders of being ―experts in stealing, cheating, deceiving and lying," and ask, "Don't you have shame? Squatting on the street, lighting a cigarette, allowing your baby to defecate all over the place‖. Yet, at the same time, Hong Kong people love mainlanders because they have a big part to play in keeping the city‘s economy dynamic. Some observers suggested that the new arrivals had a positive impact on Hong Kong‘s economy.
They provided a steady supply to the labor force and contributed to about 30% of the annual growth from 1999 to 2001 (Report of the Task Force on Population Policy, 2003).
The Hong Kong public‘s response to labor migration inflow has been mixed. A poll of 1,011 Hong Kong people on their attitudes towards immigrants conducted by the University of Hong Kong between 19 and 25 February 2004 showed that 60% of those interviewed preferred immigrants who engaged in the investment scheme and one quarter wanted professional immigrants, compared to only 8% who preferred immigrants being granted residency on the grounds of family reunions (Wong, 2008). The findings also showed that 60% of people thought the daily quota of 150 new migrants from the mainland permitted to settle in Hong Kong for reasons of family reunion was too high. Only 3.7%
said the quota was too low and 31.3% said it was reasonable. Aside from the mainland, the survey indicated that immigrants from Europe and North America were seen as most valuable, followed by those from Southeast Asia (9.8%), Japan and Korea (5.3 %), and Australia and New Zealand (4.5%) (Zheng and Wong, 2004). In other words, western immigrants are usually regarded as more valuable talents while mainland Chinese are
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looked down on.