Death in Hong Kong Fuels Feelings of Discrimination

By AUSTIN RAMZY

He still remembers the words, the handwriting even, of the slur scrawled on a whiteboard in his dormitory: “mainland dogs.” 

After moving to Hong Kong in 2010 for college, Wilson Liu Yu, a native of the central Chinese city of Wuhan, had slowly grown aware of the disdain directed at him by some local residents.
“Sometimes I got really angry, really pissed off when someone called us something like locusts and mainland dogs,” said Mr. Liu, a 21-year-old accounting major at City University of Hong Kong.
He’s since learned to brush off the comments, but for many of his fellow mainland Chinese in Hong Kong, that isn’t so easy. 

Last week the death of a 25-year-old mainland woman in a Hong Kong traffic accident aroused those feelings anew.
Stephanie Liu Han, who came from the southern province of Yunnan to study at the University of Hong Kong, then took a job at an accounting firm in 2011, was hit by a delivery truck on Hong Kong Island on Oct. 5. 

She died three days later in a local hospital.
While most people responded with shock and sadness at the death of a young woman with such a promising future, some comments on social media and local newspaper Web sites took on a cruel tone, celebrating the death of an unwanted outsider.
As more mainland residents come to Hong Kong for work, study or holiday, locals have been increasingly vocal in their disdain. 

Complaints include the coarse manners of some tourists and the rise in housing prices driven by wealthy investors. 

Mainland women coming to Hong Kong to give birth, giving their children residency status and a host of benefits that come with it, has also provoked anger.
Last year, Apple Daily, a populist, high-circulation newspaper, ran an ad showing a locust on a promontory looking over the city and calling on the government to stop the flow of mainland mothers seeking to give birth in the city.
The issue is also tied up in Hong Kong’s political future. 

Beijing has been hesitant to approve steps to further democratize Hong Kong’s semiautonomous government, like making the top government post directly elected. 

Mainlanders are sometimes seen as the embodiment of that political control.
“Pro-democracy can tend to be perceived as anti-mainland, and mainland tourists labeled together with the Beijing government,” said Mike Yao, an associate professor of media and communications at City University of Hong Kong. 

“In my opinion it’s somewhat irrational, but it’s understandable.”
Dr. Yao said that on the City University campus the situation had improved and the school’s administration had been more willing to address discrimination concerns.
Still, tensions crop up. 

Apple Daily reported Saturday that a request from mainland students at City University that the instructor of a graduate-level course on Chinese culture speak Mandarin, the national language, rather than Cantonese, the dominant Chinese dialect in Hong Kong, led to a dispute with their local classmates. 

Mainland students in the course later denied there had been any quarrel, The South China Morning Post reported.
Liu Dingning, a freshman at the University of Hong Kong and a top scorer on the college entrance examinations in her home province of Liaoning, returned home this month with hopes to attend Peking University, she told The Shenyang Evening News. 

Her grandfather told The Chengdu Commercial Daily she wasn’t comfortable learning Cantonese.
After the “mainland dogs” slur appeared in the dormitory last year, some City University mainland students wrote an open letter calling for tolerance. 

They said they were “pained that exchanges had become abusive, pained by the lack of understanding, pained that some Hong Kong people look upon the mainland with hatred, pained that Hong Kong has been seen by some mainlanders with disgust.”
There are few signs of the issue easing in society at large. 

“It’s getting worse and worse,” said Liu Xiang, a graduate of City University who helped write the open letter last year. 

A native of the northern Chinese city of Baoding, Mr. Liu now works in Hong Kong as a researcher at Yazhou Zhoukan, a Chinese-language news magazine.
The tensions have been confined to uncivil comments, the sort of thing that can be found in online forums the world over. 

But people seem to be more willing to make them than before, Liu Xiang said. 

And the subject has received wide play in the local news media.
“It’s very difficult to say whether the media are actively pushing it or just reflecting public sentiment,” Dr. Yao said. 

“At this point it’s quite visible, quite open and quite public. It may not be violent, but all it takes is one or two incidents. It’s a pretty dangerous game.”
Liu Xiang says he’s seen one small reason for optimism. 

After Ms. Liu’s death, some Hong Kong residents condemned those who posted excessively rude or insensitive comments. 

“When you see this, one feels a little bit of hope,” he said.

“There’s a tiny little bit of a change.”