You asked for readers’ views on Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung’s statement that he “didn’t know what the biggest cause of public anger was”. Of course we know the “five demands” that must be delivered, and “not one less”. But I believe there is rather more to it than that, judging by the words of protesters themselves. There is a strong tinge of nativism in their anger. Consider this from your investigative article on October 23 (“Hong Kong protests: from throwing bricks at police vans to becoming experts at putting out tear gas, meet the teenagers who are risking it all for their ideals”): “Their yearnings, as revealed on social media, imagine a Hong Kong where people speak Cantonese, patronise family-run shops and not chain stores and pharmacies catering to mainland Chinese tourists, and care for one another as neighbours in close-knit communities.” In any other country, in any other context, this would be criticised as nativist bigotry. Recently the comedian John Cleese was savaged for suggesting that London is “not really an English city any more”; this is exactly the same sentiment we see above. The dirty secret of Hong Kong’s protests: hatred of mainlanders Graffiti around Hong Kong calls mainlanders “locusts” and zhina ren , the latter a term last used by the invading Japanese in the 1930s. Nothing is more insulting to Chinese. The graffiti tianmie zhonggong – “Heaven destroy the Communist Party” – goes back to early Kuomintang days and was chanted by the Falun Gong. In short, the hatred of mainlanders is visceral and leads me to the thought that the stated worries about “Beijing interference” are really deep concerns about individual mainlanders (“locusts” and “invaders”), not so much things done by officials in Beijing. Peter Forsythe, Discovery Bay
