The Hong Kong administration announced last month it is to limit the number of the so-called birth tourists, setting a quota of 3,400 births for non-local women per year, down from 10,000 last year.

But mainlanders are flouting the rules by arriving at emergency wards in the late stages of labour.

As well as better medical treatment, newborns receive automatic residency and are entitled to 12 years free education.

The unwanted baby boom is putting a strain on resources as well as causing public anger.

Read more about the flaring tensions between mainlanders and Hong Kongers, which reached a boiling point recently with the release of an anti-mainlander Locust Song. See also an Al Jazeera report (via CDT) about the phenomenon of mainland women traveling to Hong Kong to give birth.

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On January 15th a young Mandarin-speaking girl dropped some dried noodles she had been nibbling on a Hong Kong underground train. Perhaps her family, from mainland China, did not know that eating and drinking is banned on the spotless metro. When a local Cantonese speaker objected to the noodle-eating in bad Mandarin, a quarrel erupted. The whole incident, recorded on a mobile phone, was soon viewed online by millions in Hong Kong and in China.

“That’s what mainlanders are like,” was perhaps the nastiest thing said by any Hong Konger in the metro carriage.

In a televised and characteristically nationalistic public admonishment of Hong Kongers, Peking University’s Kong Qingdong added fuel to the fire:

Kong’s comments sent a shock of rage through many Hong Kongers, and led to the commissioning of a full page anti-mainland ad in a Hong Kong publication. The ad, which characterizes mainlanders as ‘locusts,’ is reposted and described in a Wall Street Journal blog post:

The full-page ad, which shows a locust looking at the Hong Kong skyline, was paid for by an online fund-raising campaign on Facebook and local site Hong Kong Golden Forum, which received more than 100,000 Hong Kong dollars (US$12,900) from 800 donors in a week.

A man who identified himself over the phone as “Mr. Poon” and goes by “Yung Jhong” online said he organized the campaign. He said he was inspired to act after seeing news stories about mainland Chinese mothers who crossed the border to bear children in Hong Kong so that their offspring could obtain Hong Kong citizenship and the benefits that come along with it. Local authorities say that some 40,000 mainland Chinese mothers gave birth in Hong Kong hospitals last year, straining the local health-care system.

This tension between Hong Kong and the mainland is analyzed in depth by a table of seasoned China watchers in the most recent episode of Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica podcast. From the episode description:

Ongoing tension between Hong Kongers and mainland citizens erupted into open flames on February 1 when a Hong Kong group raised more than HKD 100,000 to publish a full-page anti-China advertisement in the Apple Daily comparing mainlanders to parasitic locusts and calling for curtailment of benefits enjoyed by Chinese visitors to the Special Administrative Region. The ad was the latest move in an increasingly acrimonious spat that shows no sign of letting up.

Joining Kaiser Kuo this week are Sinica co-host Jeremy Goldkorn, Mary Kay Magistad of Public Radio International, and the ever-stalwart Gady Epstein.

An article in Reuters explains how Hong Kong’s policy relationship with the mainland plays into the hostility:

Some say Hong Kong’s overly China-focused policies have corroded the city’s uniqueness, international character and values and those policies might now need revising. Mainland Chinese counter that Hong Kong for too long looked down on its mainland cousins and should not enjoy favoured status from mainland leaders.

Besides opening the floodgates to millions of free-spending Chinese after tourism went into a tailspin because of the SARS outbreak in 2003, China’s leaders have offered sweeteners to Hong Kong, including a closer economic partnership agreement and backing it as a capital raising centre and offshore yuan settlement hub.

“It’s all an outcome of a set of inclinations toward China policies laid down by the government 15 years ago,” said Chip Tsao, a well-known columnist and writer in Hong Kong, referring to the first post-handover administration of the unpopular, Beijing-backed leader, Tung Chee-hwa, whose policies sparked a mass, half-million strong anti-government demonstration in 2003.

“More Hong Kong Chinese see this in light of a bit of a conspiracy theory. They see it as a kind of colonisation of Hong Kong, or re-colonialisation of Hong Kong[...]

Finally, the folks at the Shanghaiist, who have been closely covering the drama as it unfolds, posted a video (zh) of Hong Kong youth taking to the street in song, along with accounts of mainland tourist’s reactions:

We thought this was a joke but apparently it’s dead serious. An “anti-locust choir” comprising of members of the Hong Kong Golden Forum (now apparently hacked and inaccessible) has been hitting the streets of Hong Kong and serenading tourists from the mainland with “Locust World”, a new anti-mainlander song that has been going viral in the city.

[...]One mainland tourist by the name of Mr Ma, when interviewed by Apple Daily after the “performance”, was clearly unhappy. If Hong Kongers are also Chinese, “then he must be a locust too if I’m a locust,” he fumed.

Said another tourist from the mainland, Ms You, in fluent Cantonese, “I’m from the mainland. Of course I feel uncomfortable when I hear people calling us names like that. People say that mainlanders come to Hong Kong and throw their trash everywhere, but it’s really only a small number of people that are like that.” Calling Hong Kongers dogs is also not the way to go, she added, and that people on both sides of the border need to stop insulting each other.

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The local pastime of “Spot the Mainlander” has long been an amusing diversion in Hong Kong, although it often smacks of arrogance or chauvinism. Everyone seems to have a story — almost certainly apocryphal by now — about a mainland mother holding her naked child by the wrists over a trash can to make toilet. These stories are often set in one of Hong Kong’s marbled, gleaming and obsessively clean shopping malls.

And there are other giveaways, according to Hong Kongers: The mainlanders smoke furiously, talk too loud, ignore traffic lights at crosswalks and roughly elbow their way through Hong Kong’s orderly queues. The women wear too much makeup. And the men sit funny, back on their haunches, like rural peasants. And so the profiling goes.

As China’s economy has soared in recent years, visitors from the north are now arriving with billions of dollars to spend each year. Many Hong Kongers accuse the well-heeled mainlanders of driving up the price of real estate — an odd charge, indeed, given that the speculative flipping of apartments seems to be encoded into everyone’s DNA in the S.A.R. (Meanwhile, it is widely believed here that mainlanders are worried about the social and political stability of China and are using Hong Kong real estate to park their money.)

Locals also complain that Chinese shoppers, scared about food purity and safety back home, have driven up the price of diapers, powdered milk and infant formula, stripping shelves and carting their goods back to the mainland. There’s often a fine line between shopping and smuggling.

After the handover in 1997, opinions about Hong Kong and mainland kinship have fluctuated. More recently, however, more Hong Kong residents seem to have negative feelings for mainlanders, which has Beijing worried about Hong Kong and mainland relations. The Wall Street Journal adds:

A series of incidents in this city have highlighted escalating resentment among Hong Kongers toward the ever-growing presence of mainland Chinese in the city, a shift that has Beijing both incensed and worried.

The deterioration in attitude has expressed itself in protests small and large, with “locusts” the latest insult hurled by Hong Kongers at the millions of mainlanders who come to the city to shop, see the sights and in some cases give birth. The incidents have led to harsh denunciations from Beijing.

In recent weeks the tension has risen following a poll showing that the number of Hong Kong residents identifying themselves as Chinese citizens—as opposed to Hong Kong citizens or a mix of both—fell to 16.6%, a 12-year low. Three years ago, 38.6% of Hong Kong residents considered themselves Chinese citizens.

The dispute feeds the anxieties of China’s leaders who are worried that the first democratic elections in Hong Kong, scheduled for five years from now, could empower forces hostile to Beijing. That helps to explain recent attacks by Chinese officials and Beijing-backed Hong Kong media against U.S. Consul General Stephen Young for comments he made endorsing Hong Kong’s transition to democracy. Beijing deemed his remarks to be interference in local politics.

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Furious at the remarks, scores of protesters gathered outside the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government, Beijing’s main representative office in Hong Kong. Several paraded pet dogs and banners denouncing the Beijing academic. ”We are not dogs,” the protesters shouted.

A survey of public opinion last month found feelings of kinship with the rest of China had declined since Britain pulled out in 1997. The number of respondents who said they viewed themselves as Hong Kongers was more than double the number who saw themselves as Chinese.

Professor Kong made his remarks after footage of a quarrel between mainlanders and Hong Kongers appeared on the internet last week. The video, which attracted widespread attention on the mainland, showed a Hong Kong passenger on the city’s subway system telling a noodle-munching mainlander in Cantonese that eating on the train is forbidden. A shouting match erupted and continued on the platform after someone pressed the emergency button. 

Leading Hong Kong politicians swiftly denounced the Beijing academic, who is well-known in China for his sharp tongue and hard-edged nationalist views.

Professor Kong’s comments coming amid increasing questions about Hong Kong and mainland relations, including fears in Hong Kong over a mainland baby boom on the territory. Time adds:

Hong Kong’s colonial past is one reason why many see such a rigid delineation between “us” and “them.” Large numbers of Hong Kong Chinese retain British or other foreign travel documents and take a balanced view of the colonial era — viewing it as a time of racial or social injustices, certainly, but also as source of many of the city’s defining advantages, including common law, a global outlook and media freedom. These have been contributing factors in a distinctive local culture that has long caused many Hong Kong people to quietly regard themselves as being far from ordinary Chinese. These days, however, the issue of identity is spilling into a more public forum.

A University of Hong Kong public-opinion poll that has been conducted every six months since 1997 measures the number of Hong Kong residents who identify as Hong Kong citizens, Chinese citizens or some combination of the two. In the latest survey, released in December, the number of respondents identifying themselves first and foremost as Hong Kong citizens was the highest in 10 years, while the number who saw themselves primarily as Chinese sunk to a 12-year low. The results hit a nerve: mainland officials called the poll unscientific, and state-run media lashed out at the survey’s main organizer, accusing him of working for the British to “incite Hong Kong people to deny they are Chinese.”

The area of greatest contention lies in the numbers of pregnant women from the mainland entering Hong Kong to give birth, which automatically grants the babies residency, as well as the free schooling and high-quality health care that goes along with it. In 2010, 37% of babies born in Hong Kong were to mainland families where neither parent was a Hong Kong resident. It has become alarmingly difficult for pregnant women, local or otherwise, to reserve hospital beds in the maternity ward, even after the number of mainland women allowed in Hong Kong hospitals was capped at 34,400 for this year.

A week ago, dozens of pregnant women marched in protest in the cold and rain. The women, along with hundreds more husbands and other supporters, were calling for a legislative change to overturn automatic right of abode through local birth. “If [mainland people] come here for the resources and welfare and are not contributing, then it’s a problem. It is out of control now,” said Zumi Fung, an expectant mother who was part of the protest. The Facebook group of 80,000 members that organized the demonstration has become a forum to vent vitriol at the mainland Chinese in Hong Kong, who are called by the derogatory term “locusts” and much worse.

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The latest victim, 39, fell ill on January 6 and was subsequently admitted to hospital in Guiyang – capital of Guizhou province – where his condition rapidly deteriorated, the provincial health department said in a statement.

Tests on the patient before he died confirmed he had contracted the H5N1 virus, it added.

“So far, 71 people who had close contact with the victim have not developed abnormal symptoms,” the health department said.

The latest bird flu death brings to 28 the number of people in China who have died from the disease – which is fatal in humans in about 60 per cent of cases – since 2003, out of 42 reported human cases.

After the earlier death of a man in Shenzhen, Hong Kong officials banned poultry from the mainland for 21 days. Mainland officials are now insisting that the most recent patient did not have any contact with poultry. The Washington Post reports:

Mainland officials told Hong Kong authorities the patient was a 39-year-old man who reported having no contact with poultry, government-run Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK said. It gave no other details of his identity.

Last week, Vietnam reported its first bird flu fatality in nearly two years — an 18-year-old man who worked on a duck farm.

In Cambodia, a 2-year-old boy died last week after reportedly having contact with sick poultry in his village, according to the World Health Organization.

Indonesia also has reported one bird flu death this year.

See also China, Hong Kong on bird flu alert via CDT.

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Despite this being peak influenza season, Dr. Lo Wing-lok – an infectious diseases expert and former Hong Kong legislator – remains optimistic that the Shenzhen case may yet prove isolated. “Despite talks about mutation, the situation remains the same. The disease remains a bird-to bird disease; occasionally a bird-to-human disease,” he explained. “But far from a human-to-human disease.”

However, Lo is skeptical of the Shenzhen authorities’ suggestion that avian flu is not prevalent among local poultry stocks, and that Chen likely contracted the H5N1 virus from wild birds. “This is a poultry virus, not a wild bird virus. Blaming human infection on wild birds is not conducive to epidemic control because people might become complacent about poultry, about slaughtering sick birds. As a result, more human cases could occur,” he said.

Residents of Hong Kong and the adjacent mainland Chinese province of Guangdong, in which Shenzhen is located, have reason to feel nervous about Chen’s death.

However, the Hong Kong Center for Health Protection confirmed Tuesday that the virus strain which killed Chen is similar to the strain found in dead birds in Hong Kong last month.

Chinese authorities claim that the H5N1 avian virus cannot be transmitted through humans, but Hong Kong authorities have banned poultry imports from the mainland for 21 days after a dead chicken was discovered to have been infected with the bird flu virus. Reuters adds:

“The virus found in the patient was 90 percent similar to H5N1 viruses previously isolated in ducks in China, which suggested that the man was very likely to have been infected through direct contact with a bird,” the Shenzhen Center for Disease Prevention and Control said in a statement.

“It is still not transmissible between people,” it said, adding that the bus driver was probably infected through direct contact with birds.

The virus is normally found in birds but can occasionally jump to people. Researchers worry that the virus could mutate into a form that would spread easily between humans.

Hong Kong culled 17,000 chickens at a wholesale poultry market two weeks ago after a dead chicken there tested positive for H5N1 avian virus, and suspended imports of live chickens from the mainland for 21 days in a bid to prevent any spread of the disease.

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“We will continue to manage well the relationship between stable and relatively quick economic growth, structural adjustment and inflation,” Hu said. “Global interdependence is deepening while instability and uncertainty in the world economy’s revival is increasing.”

The government is wrestling with the aftermath of past stimulus, including the debt burdens of local-government investment vehicles. Companies also face rising labor costs, and Communist Party leaders have recently sought to defuse protests over illegal land use and environmental pollution.

While the 25-member Politburo affirmed an unchanged “proactive” fiscal stance for 2012 in December, a Nov. 30 cut in banks’ reserve requirements indicated a shift toward a bigger emphasis on supporting growth.

Earlier today, the head of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, said the country would maintain a “prudent” monetary stance and ensure that policy remains stable in 2012.

While Hu addressed the economy, he also addressed the status of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. China Daily translates Hu’s speech:

In the new year, we will unswervingly adhere to the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics, follow the guidelines of Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three Represents, and further carry out the Scientific Outlook on Development. We will continue to properly deal with the relationship among maintaining a stable and relatively fast economic growth, adjusting economic structure and managing inflation expectations. We will accelerate the change of economic development mode and structural adjustment, focus on ensuring and improving people’s livelihood and work hard to consolidate the healthy momentum of economic and social development.

We will uphold the principles of “one country, two systems”, “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” and “Macao people governing Macao” with a high degree of autonomy. We will work together with our compatriots in Hong Kong and Macao to maintain long-term prosperity and stability in the two Special Administrative Regions. We will adhere to the principles of “peaceful reunification and one country, two systems,” continue to promote the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations, maintain the essential interests of the Chinese nation and enhance the common interests of compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits.

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The Hang Seng Index rose 0.1 percent to 18,080.20 at the close, with about five stocks declining for every four that rose in the 48-member gauge. The volume of stocks traded was about 40 percent less than the average over the past 100 sessions, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index of mainland companies listed in Hong Kong gained 0.1 percent to 9,740.01.

“There’s some recovery as the market sentiment stabilizes after the panic yesterday on Kim’s death,” said Ben Kwong, chief operating officer at KGI Asia Ltd. “Riots or instability aren’t surfacing at the moment.” The Hong Kong gauge is “down to a relatively low level, so there’s bound to be some bargain hunting, but if you look at the turnover, liquidity is still not ample enough to create an upward trend.”

The Hang Seng Index slumped as much as 2.5 percent yesterday on news of Kim’s death. The gauge fell 22 percent this year, led by banks and developers, as China took steps to curb inflation and property prices, and on concern Europe’s debt crisis will spread. Companies in the gauge traded at 9.8 times forecast earnings, down from 14.4 times on Dec. 31, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index trades at 12.2 times.

The Hang Seng Index and the Shanghai Composite Index are among the worst performers in 2011 in Asia. While the Hang Seng was able to rebound, the Shanghai Composite continues to drop. Reuters adds:

In Shanghai, trade was also choppy largely due to weak A-share turnover. The Shanghai Composite Index reversed early gains to finish down 0.1 percent at 2,215.9 points.

Market watchers expect the Shanghai Composite could now see near-term support at about 2,200, the 76.4 percent Fibonacci retracement of its rise from its 2005 low to 2007 peak and a level it has now finished above for three straight sessions.

On Tuesday, weakness in financial shares outweighed strength in property ones. The Shanghai financial sub-index declined 0.3 percent, while a similar gauge for the property sector gained 0.1 percent.

See also China stock market faces 4 day slump via CDT.

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Hong Kong may still be far from full democracy, but there’s enough uncertainty about the results to give Chinese officials sleepless nights. So in recent months they have ginned up a fresh campaign to accuse pro-democracy politicians of being stooges of foreign powers.

Publications controlled by Chinese officials and their allies are publicizing the donations of a local media entrepreneur, Jimmy Lai, to local pro-democracy parties as well as to the head of the local Catholic Church, Cardinal Joseph Zen, who supports pro-democracy causes. These donations were legal, but the writers allege Mr. Lai is a conduit for foreign money and influence and that the recipients are unpatriotic or even traitors. References to a “gang of four” and a rally of 2,000 people outside the headquarters of the pro-democracy Civic Party calling its leaders “black hands” recall the struggle sessions of the Cultural Revolution.

Eastweek magazine, which is owned by a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), suggested that Mr. Lai does not have the resources to make $5.4 million in donations over seven years, and that the funds came from the U.S. government. Considering Forbes magazine estimated Mr. Lai’s wealth at $660 million in 2009, this doesn’t make sense. He denies the accusation and is suing Eastweek for libel.

The piece notes suspicious patterns of people registering fake addresses in order to vote in tightly contested races, and today the Hong Kong government charged six people with vote rigging in districts in which pro-Beijing candidates performed well. From AFP:

The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) said the suspects were among 22 arrested Sunday on suspicion of lying to electoral officials about their residential addresses ahead of last month’s vote.

The vote rigging allegedly took place in the King’s Park constituency of Yau Tsim Mong District. The case is the first to go to court but the government says it is investigating a number of similar irregularities.

The ICAC alleges the six defendants gave “false information to electoral officers that a flat of a building in Yin Chong Street, Mongkok, as recorded in the final register, was their present residential address”.

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See also: “Mothers Rally Against Mainland Births in Hong Kong” from the China Post (via CDT).

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