17th August 2026 – (Hong Kong) A group of foreign tourists, shirtless, hollering, hauling themselves up on the handrails of a moving MTR carriage and swinging from the poles, while commuters shuffle away. The clip spreads. And what follows online is a curious mixture of amusement, mild eye-rolling, and a good deal of “boys will be boys.” Rowdy, yes. Disgraceful, perhaps, but the tone is forgiving. There is laughter in the comments.
Now perform the small mental experiment that so many Hongkongers themselves performed in the replies. Replace those tourists with a group of mainland visitors. Same carriage, same shirtlessness, same shouting, same swinging from the poles. The reaction would not be a chuckle. It would be a hunt. The photographs would be captioned with the ugliest available words, uploaded within minutes, and framed not as the misbehaviour of a few individuals but as proof of the essential character of an entire population. The verdict would be swift, collective, and merciless.
That gap between the two reactions is the thing worth examining slowly, because it is not really about manners at all. It is about who we have quietly decided is entitled to be forgiven.
For a century and a half, Hong Kong lived inside a racial order that placed white Westerners at the top, Cantonese-speaking locals in the middle, and darker-skinned minorities, migrant workers, and later mainland arrivals somewhere below. That order was not merely political; it was internalised, absorbed into instinct, passed down until it stopped feeling like ideology and started feeling like taste. The flag changed in 1997. The reflex did not. And a reflex is far harder to legislate away than a government.
At street level, a foreigner squatting on the pavement with a beer is read as relaxed, charming, a splash of cosmopolitan colour. A mainlander doing the same is read as uncouth, a walking argument for why the border should be higher. The identical posture, the identical act, is sorted into “chill” or “core” depending only on the face performing it. This is not a judgement about behaviour. Behaviour is merely the pretext. The judgement was made before the behaviour occurred.
Then there is the matter of enforcement, where the double standard stops being a social embarrassment and becomes something closer to a civic failure. When visiting foreign footballers were seen crossing against a red light in Tsim Sha Tsui, an offence that carries a real fine under the Road Traffic Ordinance, the response was a shrug and a search for excuses on their behalf. Had four visitors from Guangzhou done exactly the same, the forums would have combusted. Equality before the law is supposed to be one of the city’s proudest inheritances. It cannot survive being applied with one hand and suspended with the other depending on the colour of the offender.
And the reflex reaches all the way up into the boardroom. Leung Chun-ying recently complained that developers are increasingly giving residential projects English-only names, omitting Chinese entirely in a bid to project a “high‑end” image. A developer’s executive defended the practice as merely projecting an “international” feel and warned against reading too much into it. However, there is a great deal to read into it. When a building sold to Chinese buyers, in a Chinese city, is given only an English name because English is felt to signal prestige, that is the colonial hierarchy expressed in marble and glass. The developer is not inventing the preference. He is monetising one that already lives inside the buyer. The instinct on the escalator and the instinct in the sales brochure are the same instinct.
It would be too easy to blame this entirely on the past. Part of what sustains it now is a quieter anxiety about the present. As the mainland has grown richer and more advanced, some in Hong Kong have clung all the harder to a self-image built on superior “civility” and “quality,” policing the manners of mainland visitors with a zeal that says more about insecurity than about standards. Contempt directed downward and deference directed upward are often the same emotion wearing two faces.
The equality watchdog has already suggested that discrimination against mainlanders, tourists and residents alike, deserves protection under the law, a recognition that prejudice within a shared ethnicity is still prejudice. The harder work, though, cannot be done by statute. It requires each of us, in the ordinary moment of judging a stranger on a train, to notice which way our sympathy leans by default, and to ask, honestly, why. Only then can the last, longest colonial habit finally be set down.
