In a speech just months before the handover in 1997, Tung Chee-hwa declared with unbounded optimism: 'What is good for Hong Kong is good for China, and what is good for China is very good for Hong Kong.' Like many of us, he saw Hong Kong joining the motherland as a win-win situation.
Mostly it has been, and Hong Kong has gained a lot in the past 15 years. But that has not made everybody happy, and when it turns out that a prospering country has meant chipping away at the welfare of some of us here, an us-against-them antagonism has gradually built up. It exploded around the Lunar New Year.
First there was the Dolce & Gabbana incident, with hundreds of angry locals converging in front of its shop in Canton Road in protest at action by one of its security guards. After a week of public bombardment, the fashion chain issued an apology.
While this can be perceived as a public relations disaster, the uploading onto YouTube of a clip showing the confrontation between locals and mainland visitors over a child eating on the MTR sparked an angry response from a Beijing scholar. He called Hongkongers 'dogs', and that in turn triggered protests outside the central government's liaison office and on the web. It has also become international news.
I watched the full version of the MTR video clip on a mainland website. It seemed that the Hongkongers were the ones who wouldn't drop the issue even after the child stopped eating following their angry outbursts. They created a storm in a tea cup by pressing the emergency button, stopping the train and summoning MTR staff with the idea of having the mainlanders ejected from the carriage and punished. Any objective viewer would sympathise with the mainlanders; it was the Hongkongers who were guilty of disorderly conduct and endangering public safety.
As for the name-calling part, the scholar was referring to some Hongkongers who still cling to a colonial mentality of discriminating against their compatriots. No matter how you react to his comments, he is entitled to his opinion, which to a very large extent reflects that of quite a number of people across the Shenzhen River. And, for that matter, it is the Hongkongers who have called mainlanders 'Ah Chan' in the past (a name popularised by a character in a 1979 TV show, meaning country bumpkin) and recently labelled them 'locusts'.