Mainlanders reshape life in Hong Kong
Change is vast since handover
HONG KONG -- Old-time Hong Kongers sometimes call themselves the "people beneath Lion Rock," after the ragged peak that looms over the peninsula joining Hong Kong to mainland China.
At the mountain's base is the leafy suburb of Kowloon Tong. It has never been a big tourist draw, but in the decade since territorial control returned to China, this quintessentially Hong Kong neighborhood has had many more visitors -- and important changes.
Of the two barracks that used to house British troops, one lies empty and neglected, visited only by a cleaning woman who sweeps up the leaves. The other now belongs to the People's Liberation Army, though Chinese uniforms are rarely seen.
But the mainland presence is inescapable in many other places. At the local rail station, where the Hong Kong subway links with the train from Guangdong Province, raucous crowds of mainlanders spill onto the platforms and jam the escalators with huge suitcases. Police officers hover and check identification cards.
In the shopping mall connected to the station, mainland tourists snap up designer goods. The nearby university is registering more mainland students than ever.
Since the British handed over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, after ruling it for 156 years, skyscrapers have gone up and down, and momentous political battles have been fought. But few developments have affected the average Hong Konger more than the opening of the border with the mainland.
Hong Kong's population of 6.9 million people, crammed into an area the size of Nashville, has been growing rapidly.
Since 1997, more than half a million mainlanders have been allowed to move to Hong Kong , and 13.6 million visit each year. Meanwhile, the number of people who live on one side of the border and work on the other has soared -- to 500,000 from about 50,000 in the early 1990s.
In their journey into one of the world's most open and affluent economies, the mainlanders bring their own distinctive dialects, ways, and aspirations. They have reshaped just about every aspect of life -- from the conduct of business and social life to commuting, marriage, and education.
Migration from the mainland is hardly new. But for decades, it was defined by revolution and political turmoil on one side of the "bamboo curtain," while a British colony prospered on the other. Most of the old migrants were refugees, fleeing poverty, famine, communism, and persecution across a fortified international border. Many swam.
Post-1997 migrants, by contrast, are more likely to be professionals, and university students.
Hong Kongers now shop across the old border in Shenzhen as casually as American families drive to a mall in another town. Cross-border marriages are on the rise. Hong Kong's incessant street chatter has become trilingual: Cantonese, English, and the mainland's lingua franca, Mandarin.
And then there are the commuters.
"There are about half a million people crossing that border regularly, and they are not tourists," said Michael DeGolyer of Hong Kong Baptist University, who has traced social and political changes since 1989 through the Hong Kong Transition Project.
One regular crosser is Chan Tit-keung, a Hong Kong taxi driver who now lives near Shenzhen.
"I live in a big, 1,000-square-foot flat by myself, and you can get a nice place for 2,000 yuan" a month, or about $250, he said. "You can't afford a place like that in Hong Kong. I live outside the city, so the air is cleaner. "
But he is less happy to see mainlanders moving into Hong Kong in search of higher wages -- helping to lower them. Hong Kong has no legal minimum wage.
After the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Hong Kongers emigrated in large numbers to Western countries. As China's political situation has stabilized and its economy surged, émigrés have been returning. If local anxiety once centered on the Chinese government, now it is on how the city will handle the new arrivals. 