Let’s treat our mainland visitors with more respect

Looking back in time to the early days of Hong Kong, it was little more than a very sparsely populated “barren rock”, with just a few small fishing villages located on what much later turned into today’s bustling and fabulously wealthy international city. Generations of new immigrants, most of them from the north, arrived and set to with energy, working hard to make a better life for themselves and for their families. In so doing, they contributed mightily toward the development of the supremely successful Hong Kong which we know today.

This naturally means that for most of today’s Hong Kong families, their origins (only a couple of generations ago) were from what we now call the Chinese mainland. It often seems to us foreign observers rather ironic that some of today’s Hong Kong residents seek to portray themselves as very different and superior to today’s visitors from the north. Of course, people raised in different places will behave differently, and indeed some of those differences will unfortunately not serve to make others more accepting of them.

But there is something unpleasantly prejudicial in the total disrespect, sometimes downright contempt, towards all mainland visitors which is too often displayed by some of our younger Hong Kong-born citizens who seemed to harbor an inexplicable superiority complex. Over recent years, the unseemly sight of local activists harassing mainland visitors brings shame upon Hong Kong people’s traditional civility. To object to and to vilify all people from another place, and especially those with the very same ethnic origin as yourself, is particularly reprehensible not to mention morally insupportable.

Hong Kong, with well over 65 million tourist arrivals last year, is nowadays one of the world’s most-visited places. Of those 65 million, about 51 million were from the Chinese mainland, a growth factor of 15 percent over 2017. Of late, their increasing number has come under less welcoming scrutiny, although they certainly helped boost our economy and create employment.

Hong Kong has always had visitors, and plenty of them, thanks to its strategic geographical location. But their sheer numbers are creating challenges on various fronts. Improving and creating more facilities to accommodate these holidaymakers which bring us prosperity should be our approach to tackling the current mismatch, and not turning them away by treating them with hostility. A notable point here is that these tourists tend to congregate in the same already congested downtown areas, rather than being spread out across the whole of Hong Kong’s territory. Locals who dislike crowds would be well-advised to steer clear of such busy tourist hotspots as Tsim Sha Tsui and Causeway Bay. These 51 million visitors presently are not spread out evenly throughout the year, at the rate of roughly a million a week. Rather, they tend to be concentrated on short stays over holidays and weekends, leading to further overcrowding in what is already one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

As new fast train and bridge structures better connecting us with the north open up, then of course more visitors are likely to travel to Hong Kong on them. Indeed, wasn’t that a key factor prompting Hong Kong to originally provide these expensive enhanced infrastructure facilities? Our Hong Kong authorities should have also carefully planned ahead as to how best to look after and manage these rapidly increasing tourist numbers. Over a few recent weeks, for example, mainland visitor numbers on the Lantau Ngong Ping 360 cable cars doubled, causing congestion and long queues.

The vast numbers of people initially arriving here on the new bridge, causing significant transport logjams, showed that we in Hong Kong had not sufficiently prepared for dealing with the expected upshot in visitor numbers. You can’t fairly blame the visitors themselves for the bottlenecks. Instead, the government should have taken more comprehensive preparatory steps in anticipation in terms of more entertainment, housing, transport, eating and shopping facilities.

One important point that must not be overlooked is that if the increasing clashes between the visitors and local residents are not soon mitigated, it will play into the hands of a minority of extreme political activists — the Hong Kong independence advocates. The best way to prevent that is for the government and the community at large to collaborate to ensure that all our visitors are treated with respect and civility through a better management of facilities to meet their needs. All sources of animosity between our visitors and local citizens should be nipped in the bud in the interest of our social, political and economic stability.

The government should have taken more comprehensive preparatory steps in anticipation in terms of more entertainment, housing, transport, eating and shopping facilities.