ANNA NING LIHONG learned to speak Cantonese fluently within a year of moving to Hong Kong from Beijing in 1996. Now, the 27-year-old has a big circle of Hong Kong friends and a local boyfriend. 'I hang out with Hongkongers more than mainlanders,' says the marketing director for art gallery J Gallery. 'We go to dinner, shopping, hiking, all kinds of stuff.'
Ten years ago, mainlanders in Hong Kong were still stereotyped as country bumpkins and prime shoplifting candidates. After the handover, that image shifted radically, as bankers and lawyers with overseas degrees poured into Hong Kong and were branded arrogant elitists. But today, according to academics, the distinctions between mainlanders and Hongkongers are blurring. Mainlanders and Hongkongers aren't just co-operating in the workplace, they're socialising - and even getting hitched.
With the easing of travel restrictions for mainland visitors and the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement taking effect in January, there's more business, social and cultural exchange with the mainland today than ever before. Furthermore, as both groups study abroad, they are becoming increasingly western-ised and globalised.
More than 50,000 mainland immigrants have settled in Hong Kong every year since the daily quota was raised to 150 in 1995, giving the two groups plenty of opportunity to get to know each other - in some cases, very well. Almost a third of all marriages here in 2003 - 11,613 out of 34,439 - were between Hongkongers and mainlanders, according to the Immigration Department. The government's Admission Scheme for Mainland Talents and Professionals, launched last July, has helped swell the ranks of the highly educated, with the issuing of more than 2,500 entry visas.
Although cultural differences persist, the distinctions aren't as clear-cut as they once were. 'The people of Hong Kong and South China are producing a regional hybridised culture that is gradually overcoming the sharp boundaries once drawn by many Hong Kong people vis-a-vis their Chinese neighbours,' says Eric Ma Kit-wai, an associate professor of journalism and communications at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who specialises in cultural identity studies. Rather than simply labelling someone a Hongkonger or a mainlander, people are forming impressions based on many factors, he says. 'North, south, urban, rural, professional, middle-class, grass-roots worker. . .'
He says conflicts will increasingly be based less on geography and more on class. 'When you talk about cultural conflict in everyday life, it's class-based,' Ma says. 'I have more and more mainland friends. I have just made a new mainland friend who got a PhD overseas and then came to Hong Kong to work in a sociological institute.'