This is because they live in a completely different socio-economic environment.
People living in Central cannot see how taxi drivers selectively operate in Northern Districts, expats who send their children to International schools would have little problem in securing a place in the local primary school. These might sound trivial, but the essence of the problem is a lot less trivial.
To put it simply, Hong Kongers are under-represented. I am not talking about the super-rich, but Hong Kongers belonging to the middle and lower class, who were born in Hong Kong and consider Hong Kong their home. Patience is wearing thin after 150 years of colonial government, and another 18 years of de-facto colonisation. Hong Kongers have virtually no representation in the negotiations of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The bulk of Hong Kongers have no representation in the drafting of the Basic Law, when the meagre two legislators (out of 59) representing progressive Hong Kongers were forced to quit midway due to irreconcilable differences.
The transfer of power from Britain to China in 1997 was conducted behind a backdrop of power brokerage of big nations. Singapore, on the other hand, at least had a referendum vote on merging with Malaysia in 1963. The Singaporeans also gave consent towards drafting the constitution of the Malaysian federation. Hong Kong never had the opportunity to give mandate, and thence the seeds of discontent were sewed.
From this point, things can only go worse. Being predominantly raised in a completely different set of cultural values, the majority of the Hong Kongers are excluded from the establishment. The Hong Kong government has no political mandate. They are supported by the alliance of Beijing and Hong Kong tycoons, and therefore the government has no political capital to address public policies that would hurt the tycoons. This period is most apparent in 2003-2010, when “the Land and the ruling class” became a bestseller in Hong Kong and “地產霸權” (loosely translated as “property developer hegemony”) became a buzzword.
Desperate trying to cling onto power and attempting to gain popular support, Beijing naturally turn to the 55,000 immigrants who arrive to Hong Kong from China per annum. These are people whom were brought up in a completely different social-political background, and they are straining the public services in Hong Kong.
I once talked to a retired government official from the Social Welfare Department in Hong Kong and he laments, “the projection figures are all there, the sums do not add up. The pressure on Hong Kong’s social welfare system will only worsen in the future. The Administrative Officers in government should all know about this, but there is silence on this topic at the very top.”
It is therefore inherent in the system for the government wanting to encourage social tension, and the natural reaction of an average Hong Konger would be to resist- and this is nativism in a nutshell. This is not a problem of the same scale that EU countries face in light of EU super-sovereignty. Firstly, China is disproportionately bigger than Hong Kong. Secondly, Beijing inherits from a political heritage of a Leninist ideology, that actively encourages the use of the state machine to crush everything obstructing its path.
With talks of devolution in European countries and the future of Hong Kong murky. I end with the quote of former Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies warning Britain’s decision to join the ECC, “I run a federation, I know how federations work. They are either centripetal, in which case the states came closer and closer together as in Australians, or they were centrifugal, with states moving further and further apart until they eventually broke away. They are never static. There was no other dynamic at work in such groupings.”
And the bell tolls for thee.
- 熱血時報網站連結 http://www.passiontimes.hk/article/07-14-2015/24355
- Copyright © 2015
「脫支奶」 - Milk of dissociate with the Chinese things. 「支」is a Cantonese pronunciation of English "Chi" from the old day. 「支那」is "Chi-na".
