Most people outside Hong Kong encounter the city’s anti-mainland sentiment and reach for the simplest explanation: racism. What actually drives the tension between Hongkongers and mainland Chinese citizens stretches back decades through real estate markets, food safety disasters, hospital waiting rooms, and deadly epidemics that the city still hasn’t fully processed. Understanding it starts long before any protest sign was painted or any slur was muttered on an MTR platform.
In the early 1980s, China was in the middle of an economic transformation. Deng Xiaoping launched what became known as the Reform and Opening Up policy that loosened state controls on commerce and invited foreign investment into China for the first time since the Communist Party took power in 1949. For Hong Kong investors, this was an obvious opportunity. Just across the Shenzhen River, barely an hour from the city’s financial district, sat an enormous pool of cheap labour.
Hong Kong money flooded north, and factories multiplied. A new class of wealthy mainland businessmen began to emerge, people who had accumulated significant capital but were living inside a country with strict capital controls. The Chinese yuan, or renminbi, carried almost no weight on international markets. The Hong Kong dollar, pegged to the American currency and recognized as a global financial instrument, was a different story entirely. For any mainland businessman who wanted to protect his savings, buy property abroad, or invest beyond China’s borders, Hong Kong was essential.
The inward flow of mainland capital sent Hong Kong’s real estate market climbing. The city was already short on land with a population that had been swelling for decades as waves of Chinese immigrants arrived to escape first the Civil War, then the harsh realities of early Communist rule. When mainland money started arriving in search of a reliable store of value, housing prices responded accordingly.
Hong Kong had earned a reputation as having some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, a designation it has stubbornly retained. The city’s minimum wage is a fraction of what a worker in Toronto earns, yet housing costs track closely with one of the most expensive markets in North America. The disparity between wages and living costs created a city where working-class residents were being priced out of the neighbourhoods their families had occupied for generations, while new money from across the border kept pushing values higher.
At the same time as real estate pressure was building, a different kind of crisis was developing in mainland China’s food supply. As manufacturers raced to keep production costs as low as possible, corners were cut in ways that put public health at genuine risk.
A major Chinese milk powder manufacturer was found to have adulterated its infant formula with melamine to make the product appear higher in protein than it actually was. The result was catastrophic. Over 300,000 infants developed kidney problems, and six babies died. The scandal was a signal that the systems meant to protect ordinary Chinese citizens were not functioning in any meaningful way.
For mainland parents, the implications were terrifying. If you couldn’t trust the formula feeding your newborn child, what could you trust? The answer, for many, was Hong Kong. The city maintained its own food safety standards, entirely separate from China’s regulatory framework, and its products had a track record that mainland goods simply didn’t. What followed was a surge in demand for Hong Kong infant formula that the city was never designed to handle. Mainlanders arrived in large numbers to purchase cans of formula and carry them back across the border. Local parents found themselves competing for a basic necessity against shoppers who had no intention of leaving any of it behind.
In 2013, the Hong Kong government responded by limiting formula exports to two cans per person. A local government was forced to ration baby food in one of the world’s wealthiest financial centres because external demand had overwhelmed a domestic supply that local families depended on.
The formula crisis was one visible symptom of a larger pattern that Hongkongers were living with daily. Mainland visitors were redirecting the city’s resources in ways that locals felt acutely and personally.
Hong Kong’s public hospitals, already stretched by the demands of a dense urban population, were seeing mainland women choosing to give birth in the city. Under Hong Kong law, a child born in the territory was entitled to permanent residency, and with it access to freedoms that mainland China denied its citizens. A Hong Kong birth certificate was worth something real and measurable. So maternity wards were filled with patients who had travelled specifically to deliver there, consuming beds, staff hours, and medical resources that locals depended on.
Hongkongers reached for the word “locust” to describe what they were witnessing. A locust consumes everything in its path, without awareness and without apology. To the Hongkonger watching a pharmacy strip its shelves of formula to fill a shopping bag headed for Shenzhen, or waiting longer in an emergency room because patients had bypassed closer mainland hospitals, the metaphor felt right.
What made it worse was the response from some mainland voices, who framed the cross-border spending as a boost to Hong Kong’s economy that locals should be grateful for. To Hongkongers feeling the squeeze, this read as arrogance. The sense that their city was being taken from them was difficult enough to live with. Being told to say thank you for it was something else.
The resentment that had built through real estate pressure, food crises, and resource competition hardened into something deeper in 2003, when SARS reached Hong Kong. The disease originated in southern China and arrived in Hong Kong through a single infected traveller who checked into a hotel in Kowloon before spreading the virus to other guests. From there, it moved through the city with terrible efficiency.
The outbreak killed 299 people in Hong Kong alone. Entire residential blocks were quarantined. The most notorious was Amoy Gardens, where the disease tore through the residents of Block E with particular ferocity. The image of residents being led out of their building in face masks, their block sealed behind them, became one of the defining photographs of the crisis.
Among those who died was Dr. Joanna Tse Yuen-man, a young physician who chose to remain on the front lines treating isolated patients long after others had stepped back. She contracted SARS and died from it in May 2003. Hongkongers remember her not as someone who gave everything to protect her community, even knowing the cost. Her name is still invoked today in discussions about civic courage and what Hongkongers believe defines their city at its best.
When the outbreak was eventually contained, the Chinese government issued statements celebrating its own role in defeating the epidemic. To Hongkongers who had watched the virus cross into their city from the mainland, who had buried their doctors, who had lived through the fear, those statements landed as a grotesque misreading of events. China had brought the disease to its door and was now taking a bow for cleaning it up.
By the time COVID-19 arrived, Hongkongers were responding to one they recognized. The announcement by then-Chief Executive Carrie Lam that mainland Chinese patients could receive free treatment in Hong Kong’s public hospitals reignited a familiar outrage. Reports circulated of mainland patients being transferred to Hong Kong facilities even when closer hospitals were available across the border. The border itself remained more open, which some interpreted as an unwillingness to inconvenience mainland visitors even at the cost of local safety.
Every one of these flashpoints fed a conviction that the interests of Hongkongers came second in their own city. This is because of the reality in which mainland China pressed constantly against a smaller place that couldn’t push back at all. Understanding this history is ugly, but mistaking accumulated, evidence-based grievance for hatred misses the point and makes it impossible to have an honest conversation about what Hongkongers have actually been through.
If you’ve read even part of this, the most useful thing you can do is resist the easy framing. When you encounter anti-mainland Chinese sentiment, ask what it’s responding to before you decide what it means. Dig deeper into Hong Kong’s post-handover history. Seek out accounts by people who were actually there; there is no shortage of testimony. What’s often missing is the willingness to sit with a story that doesn’t resolve cleanly.
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