MB July | “I will never go to Hong Kong again!” | 20 years of HKSAR

Please choose the most striking moment of these 20 years of the HKSAR.

“2002/2003 – SARS and the Article 23 crisis; 2007 – the promise by Beijing that the people of Hong Kong would be allowed to directly elect the Chief Executive in 2017 and legislators by 2020; September-December 2014 – the Umbrella Movement,” political commentator Éric Sautedé, now based in Hong Kong, told Macau Business.

“The HKSAR has been characterised by the rapid rise of pro-democracy populism versus pro-Beijing populism since the half a million people protests of July 2003, followed by the anti-national education movement in 2012, the Occupy Central Movement in 2014, the Mong Kok riots in early 2016, and also a series of court cases dealing with the legacies of the Occupy Movement and Mong Kok riots,” are the choices of Sonny Lo.

In common in the choices of the two political scientists is the Umbrella Movement [because people used umbrellas to repel tear gas bombs], also known as the Occupy Central Movement (2014).

The selection of the 2014 protests as the most striking moment of these 20 post-handover years is not only justified by what Sonny Lo describes as “the damage inflicted upon Hong Kong society and polity (. . .) profound because it will take a long time for the people of Hong Kong to rebuild political trust among themselves.”

I will never go to Hong Kong again! is the title of a research paper from Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangzhou, published this year in Tourism Management journal.

Qiuju Luo and Xueting Zhai analysed how the Occupy Central event was treated by the Weibo social network: “Because of the event’s political sensitivity, the information spreading in Mainland China was under strict control, and reports from mainstream and mass media were of obvious political orientation. However, it is worth noting that social media have come to constitute a significant tool for promoting the communication of Occupy Central. Based upon statistics collected by the author, with the spread of Occupy Central on the Chinese social media Weibo, more and more people in Mainland China began to get involved.”

Both teachers from the School of Tourism Management found that “more and more negative emotions towards Hong Kong were displayed, along with the intentional behaviour of a tourism boycott. These showed a strong reluctance to travel to Hong Kong, as for example, one suggesting ‘Only those who have nothing to do will go to Hong Kong’.”

As a conclusion of the research, Luo and Zhai state: “Weibo users showed strong feelings of antipathy toward the Hong Kong Government’s behaviour of emphasising tourism promotion in Mainland China, and meanwhile continued to express the opinion of boycotting travel to Hong Kong through strong confrontational emotion towards Hong Kong people.”


Locusts and nativism

“The past 20 years have witnessed a historic turning point of relations between Mainland China and Hong Kong,” point out Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University professors Qiuju Luo and Xueting Zhai.

If in the beginning, travel to Hong Kong “was not extensively open to Mainland Chinese because of the Chinese government’s control, a tremendous change took place in 2003 when the central government released the Individual Visit Scheme policy.”

Luo and Zhai add: “However, despite the positive economic benefits the surge of Mainland Chinese tourists to Hong Kong, meanwhile, also caused strong social conflicts, resulting in a series of problems such as a milk powder shortage, a large influx of pregnant Mainland Chinese women and subsequent anchor babies, increased prices, and traffic tensions.”

A fellow scholar on the Hong Kong subject, Japanese Toru Kurata, goes deeper: “As demonstrations in Hong Kong in protest against the mass influx of tourists from mainland China have become tinged with hate speech (with tourists from the Mainland branded as ‘locusts’ devouring everything in their path before moving on), Mainlanders’ impressions of the people of Hong Kong are said to have deteriorated – the Mainland Chinese being keenly aware of the fact that they are supporting Hong Kong’s economy through their tourism and spending.”

Chinese tourists are one of the targets of the new far-right nativist groups fuelled by an anti-Mainland campaign and xenophobic ideology: “They not only advocate Hong Kong independence, which most moderates regard as unrealistic, but specifically target Chinese immigrants, tourists and parallel traders,” says University of Macau scholar Shih-Diing Liu.

No wonder that “under these circumstances, the number of Mainland Chinese tourists arriving in Hong Kong dropped hugely in 2015,” according to professors Qiuju Luo and Xueting Zhai. “Tourists abandoned Hong Kong for Macau after the Mong Kok riots, leading to a 10 per cent visitor slump over the Lunar New Year,” according to Tourism Board Chairman Peter Lam Kin-ngok. “In Macau, during the Golden Week, there was a 4.7 per cent increase [in visitors],” the Hong Kong Standard newspaper reported last year.


Twenty years

1997 – Tung Chee-hwa is the first Chief Executive of the HKSAR

2001 – Deputy Chief Executive Anson Chan resigns under pressure from Beijing

2003 – 500,000 people march against Article 23

2004 – 200,000 people protest in the streets, demanding to elect the next Chief Executive by universal suffrage

2005 – Tung Chee-hwa resigns. He is succeeded by Donald Tsang

2007 – Donald Tsang is appointed to a new five-year term

2007 – Beijing says it will allow the people of Hong Kong to directly elect their Chief Executive in 2017 and LegCo by 2020

2012 – Leung Chun-ying takes office as Chief Executive

2014 – “More than 90% of the nearly 800,000 people taking part in an unofficial referendum vote in favour of giving the public a say in short-listing candidates for future elections of the territory’s Chief Executive. Beijing condemns the vote as illegal”

2014 – The largest pro-democracy rally in a decade

2014 – Chinese government say that only candidates approved by Beijing will be allowed to run.

2014 – “Pro-democracy demonstrators occupy the city centre for weeks in protest at the Chinese government’s decision to limit voters’ choices in the 2017 Hong Kong leadership election. More than 100,000 people took to the streets at the height of the Occupy Central protests”

2015 – Legislative Council rejects proposals for electing the territory’s next leader in 2017

2016 – High Court disqualifies pro-independence legislators Sixtus Leung and Yau Wai-Ching from taking their seats in the Legislative Council after they refuse to pledge allegiance to China at a swearing-in ceremony

2017 – In March, CY Leung’s deputy Carrie Lam wins the Electoral College vote to become the next Chief Executive

(Source: BBC-Timeline)

 

Macau’s reputation among Hongkongers | 20 years of HKSAR