Opinion | Anti-mainlander protest shouts out an ugly truth

What happened in Canton Road last Sunday was repugnant. There are more civil ways to express fear over the city being swamped than taunting mainlanders as "locusts" to their face. But I am going to stick my neck out and say that what happened needed to happen.

Let's admit it, without the repugnance, would we all be talking about the protest? Decent people were shocked but the incident did more than anything so far to force onto us an inconvenient truth - that there is genuine public frustration about the city being overwhelmed by visitors.

Top officials, from the chief executive down, lined up to condemn the behaviour of the protesters as totally un-Hong Kong. It was, of course, politically correct for them to do so. But the mainlanders who suffered the indignity of being called "locusts" were more the victims of the failed policies of these officials than of the protesters, who used ugly tactics to highlight what policymakers pretend doesn't exist - a growing public resentment against mainlanders.

Saying what happened last Sunday needed to happen doesn't mean I condone the actions of the protesters. It just means we need to replace political correctness with honesty.

If you did that, would you not admit the protest, distasteful as it was, represented your inner feelings? Did it not remind you of how you resent having to wait for four MTR trains before you are able to board, or how you can no longer ride the Peak Tram because of the long lines? Did it not make you hope that our policymakers would wake up? I asked this of four Hongkongers and they all replied in the affirmative.

Sometimes you need a fist between the eyes to wake you up. Last Sunday's ugliness was that fist. Did it wake up our policymakers? The answer is no. What else did they do after expressing moral outrage? They repeated the same mantra about Hong Kong's survival being dependent on an ever rising tide of tourists instead of admitting we have a problem that needed fixing.