Preposterous ‘nativism’

The July 18, 2013 edition of Focus, an opinion program on ATV, featured a commentary by Tong Man. It ruthlessly exposed the idiotic nature of the “native awareness” campaign waged by opposition lawmakers Claudia Mo and Gary Fan. This author felt really great watching Tong tear the hopelessly narrow-minded and utterly confused “Hong Kong nativism” rhetoric into pieces.

The “native awareness” Mo and Fan emphasize is shortsighted and narrow-minded at best. Take the traffic system for example, just to be realistic, Hong Kong should switch to right-hand traffic (RHT), because it is the majority choice around the world. Most foreign visitors coming to Hong Kong are used to RHT and find our left-hand traffic (LHT) uncomfortable, to put it mildly; while Hong Kong residents touring overseas often feel lost and unsafe because the RHT system is so strange to them. If only for Hong Kong residents’ safety in RHT regions and that of visitors accustomed to RHT when they come to Hong Kong, we should abandon LHT and switch to RHT as soon as possible. But, of course, Mo and Fan would have none of that no matter how convincing the RHT advocates are, because they hate the mainland so much even adopting RHT means being “mainlandized” or “painted red”.

The owner of a café in Tseung Kwan O Plaza chose to use simplified Chinese characters in a big sign to attract customers from the mainland and make them feel more at home. Although business decisions like this are common across the globe nowadays, Fan, the densely bigoted politician, felt compelled to teach that politically incorrect shop owner a lesson by staging a noisy protest outside the eatery last year. It’s no secret how stupefying political prejudice can be, but Fan’s example must be extremely difficult to top, considering the fact that he has absolutely no problem with shops and restaurants that use only foreign languages and no Chinese, simplified or traditional.