My Take | Hong Kong people have superiority complex about mainland China
- Many believe they are fundamentally better than those over the border and there is something deeply wrong about being ruled by ‘barbarians’
For a long time, I thought protesters who waved the colonial, British and American flags and sang their national anthems during protests were doing so just to spite Beijing and Chinese nationalists.
There is surely a strong element of that. Now, though, I realise some of them actually mean it. I have seen too many videos showing protesters and rioters who immediately calmed down, reacted reasonably and/or even backed away when Western-looking people intervened in their actions.
Whether it was blocking road traffic, rallying at the airport, stopping MTR trains from running or in a new YouTube clip, arguing with an expatriate woman who was tearing down messages from a “Lennon Wall” – they amazingly showed awe, respect or deference.
If a mainlander or a local did it, they would beat them up.
Given the chance, there is a small but vocal subset of Hong Kong people who really want the Brits to recolonise the city or the Americans to take it over. But since that’s an impossibility, they accept the next best thing, which is to get those Western countries to interfere in Hong Kong as much as possible.
That may be hard for outsiders, especially mainlanders, to understand. Didn’t Hong Kong get over a century and a half of colonial rule like it was yesterday?