North district school places allocated calmly under wary police eye
Small groups of protesters target mainlanders, but school place allocations stay calm amid measures restricting cross-border competition
Hong Kong's newest batch of preschool children yesterday took their first steps into the world of formal education flanked by lines of police officers.
Whether the thin blue line laid out either side of them as they walked hand-in-hand with their parents was absolutely necessary is a debate for another day, but the scene paints a stark picture of how in 2015 Hong Kong division and rancour - or at least the perception of it - threatens to dominate the narrative of something even as innocent - if competitive - as where a child goes to school.
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As it turned out, tolerance and common sense won the day as most Hong Kong parents living in the North district appeared relieved when the annual school-place allocation results came out yesterday - in the second year of a policy that restricts cross-border pupils from competing with locals in the city's border area.
And the reason for the heavy police presence? A protest by fewer than 20 so-called nativists unhappy about mainland parents sending their children to schools in the city. The tiny protest was just the latest in a string of similarly small demonstrations of anti-mainland sentiment, which receive media and police attention in inverse proportion to their size.
The scenes played out as parents living on the mainland went to HHCKLA Buddhist Wisdom Primary School in Sheung Shui to pick up place-allocation results yesterday.
Metal barricades separated parents and pupils from two activist groups, Hong Kong Localism Power and Civic Passion, who used loudspeakers and called on parents to take their children back to the mainland. Their choice of persuasion was a banner displaying Chinese characters that read "Go back to the mainland, locust children!"