When Peking University professor Kong Qingdong called Hong Kong people “bastards,” “thieves” and “dogs of British imperialists,” he might have known people proud of the wealthy former colony would bite back. They snapped back with venom, scores of them protesting Sunday outside the Beijing Liaison Office in Hong Kong. Many brought along their pets and some shouted that they would rather be “a dog in Hong Kong than a human in China.” The angry spat erupted after video went viral across China of a mainland woman being told off by Hong Kong passengers for eating on the city's squeaky clean subway network, sparking the Beijing academic's vitriolic rant in a television interview. It might seem a trivial piece of cross-border bitching, but the war of words underlined growing tension between Hong Kong people and their big brother to the north in the run-up to the 15th anniversary in July of the territory's return to Chinese sovereignty. Just a fortnight before Sunday's canine-themed protest, more than 1,000 people demonstrated outside Dolce and Gabbana in Hong Kong after security guards ruled that only mainland Chinese customers could take photographs outside the store. Hong Kong people were furious at what they saw as their second-class citizen treatment in favor of moneyed shoppers from mainland China. Further protests continued outside the store until the Italian fashion chain backed down and apologized. More significantly still, a survey in December found the ratio of people in Hong Kong who consider themselves Hong Kongers rather than Chinese is growing, reversing a trend towards “Chineseness” that has been encouraged by the territory's Beijing-appointed government since 1997. Robert Chung, head of the University of Hong Kong team that conducted the survey, said the findings were surprising given China's economic success.
