TheEconomistNovember 9th 2019 371A
few daysago, Huang Qixuan, a 21-year-
old from mainland China who is study-
ing accountancy in Hong Kong, was walk-
ing through his campus, talking to his fa-
ther by phone. He passed a black-clad local
student who was holding a placard in sup-
port of the pro-democracy unrest that has
racked the city for nearly five months. “It’s
chaotic,” he said to his father in Mandarin,
the mainland’s common tongue. Incensed,
the local shouted into Mr Huang’s face in
Cantonese, the language of most Hong
Kongers. “Liberate Hong Kong!” the protes-
ter kept on yelling as he followed Mr
Huang. “Revolution of our times!” chanted
passers-by, encouraging the pursuer.
Communist Party-controlled news-
papers in Hong Kong say the city is in the
grip of a “black terror”, a reference to the
protesters’ adopted colour. Mr Huang
agrees, and has plenty of evidence to con-
firm his anxiety. On WeChat, a messaging
app used by many mainlanders in Hong
Kong, who include around 12,000 universi-
ty students, videos have gone viral of at-
tacks on people from China’s interior. One
such incident, on November 2nd, involved
a woman who was accosted by protesters in
a touristy part of the city after she allegedly
took close-up shots of people in masks (the
government recently banned the wearing
of them by demonstrators). During the en-
counter the woman’s face was splattered
with a sticky black substance. On the next
day a mainlander shouted “We are all Chi-
nese, long live China!” inside a shopping
mall. He then fled to escape an angry
crowd, who swore and threw objects at a
fireman trying to shield him.
During the past few weeks, such as-
saults have become more common. The
protest movement, meanwhile, has in-
creasingly taken aim at property connected
with the mainland. On November 2nd prot-esters vandalised the office building of
Xinhua, the mainland’s state-run news
agency, smashing its glass doors, spraying
graffiti on it and starting a small fire in the
lobby (the damage is pictured). Other
mainland premises that have recently been
vandalised include a branch of Tong Ren
Tang, a pharmacy; an outlet of Xiaomi, an
electronics company; and Chung Hwa, a
bookshop, on which protesters sprayed the
words “Chinazi income source”. Some
mainland-related shops have erected met-
al barricades as shields against attacks.
Such incidents have contributed to a
dramatic fall in the number of mainland
tourists. In the first week of October, a na-
tional holiday, there were 56% fewer of
them than a year earlier. At one tourist
magnet, a large sculpture of a Bauhinia
flower that was presented to Hong Kong by
the central government, a mainlander who
has lived in Hong Kong for two years and
earns money photographing tourists says
that on a recent Sunday only about ten
coaches stopped to let mainlanders off
nearby. Before the unrest around 100 of
them would have pulled up, he says.
Students from the mainland feel partic-
ularly vulnerable because many of those at
the forefront of the unrest are people with
whom they share their classes: locals who
have daubed the pavements of campuses
with slogans and filled whole corridors
with political messages. In the West, Chi-
nese students can flaunt their nationalismMainlanders in Hong Kong
Black terror
HONG KONG
To mainland Chinese, a liberal enclave feels increasingly menacing
China
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