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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Why is public anger growing internationally against China?
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Why is public anger growing internationally against China?

As the New Year dawns, the Chinese govt faces the Ugly Chinese abroad, and the nation itself, full of sound and fury, like a slithering dragon emitting flames

Vendors sell towels featuring mocking portraits of Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-Ying, and a cartoon cutout of his wife Regina, inside a Lunar New Year market at Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. Photo: ReutersPremium
Vendors sell towels featuring mocking portraits of Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-Ying, and a cartoon cutout of his wife Regina, inside a Lunar New Year market at Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. Photo: Reuters

Families gather at the time of the Chinese New Year. Children wear red; oranges (always in even numbers) are exchanged; the young get little red envelopes with gifts, called hong bao; a traditional feast follows.

But for tourists from China visiting Hong Kong this holiday season has been an unpleasant experience. Keen to shop for bargains presumably unavailable in China, they come to Hong Kong in thousands. This time, however, at one mall they were greeted by protesters wearing masks around their mouths and noses (so as not to inhale) and shouting at them.

Hong Kongers are annoyed with the Chinese for several reasons. One is the civic and the immediate—the mainlanders are different from the Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers; they sometimes seem less sophisticated, and in some instances they have behaved in ways that Hong Kongers consider outrageous (such as letting their children relieve themselves in public). Such incidents could have been dismissed as the classic clash of cultures between the urban sophisticates and country bumpkins. But it has acquired a harder edge this year.

China, and by implication Hong Kong’s Chinese-appointed chief executive Leung Chun-Ying, did not relent when thousands of Hong Kongers occupied the city’s downtown, demanding a fairer election process in what came to be known as the umbrella revolution. Chinese stubbornness paid off.

In greeting Hong Kongers for the New Year, Leung made a remarkably inept speech, calling upon Hong Kongers to be “more like sheep". According to the Chinese zodiac, the New Year is indeed the year of the sheep, but it was hardly the smartest metaphor to use in a a former British colony, where sheep aren’t understood only to be gentle and calm, as the Chinese see them, but as docile, as the term “sheep-like" is understood in English.

Hong Kong is not the only place where overseas Chinese form the majority and where mainlanders find themselves unpopular, if not unwelcome. The mood in Singapore is also turning sour. Blogs and websites in the Southeast Asian republic have sometimes carried jokes and attacks on mainlanders who have migrated to Singapore. Problems the city now faces—from high property prices to crowded mass transit—are blamed on mainlanders. The wealthy Chinese from the mainland who make Singapore their home are also resented. In 2012, a Ferrari 599 GTO raced through a red light and struck a taxi which then hit a motorbike, killing three, including the driver of the Ferrari, a 31-year-old Chinese businessman. The incident was enough to spark furious denunciations of the Chinese.

Beyond Southeast Asia too the Chinese abroad are looked at with trepidation. Chinese investments in Zambia had become an election issue. Small businesses resent cheap Chinese imports, as is happening to Nigeria’s textile industry. In 2008, during a visit to Liberia I saw local shopkeepers selling locally made tools going out of business because Chinese hawkers were selling cheaper alternatives made in China. Rebel forces in local conflicts in different parts of Africa have occasionally abducted Chinese oil industry workers and demanded ransom from the companies.

As China’s economic strength grows, and its political influence increases, public anger and disenchantment internationally is growing, not only in the corners of Africa which are far from home, but much closer, in places that China might consider to be part of its own sphere of influence—Hong Kong and Singapore.

As a New Year dawns for the Chinese, the Chinese people and their government face a world where the image they invoke is not that of fine calligraphy and the fragrance of delicious dim sum and soy sauce, but the behaviour of the Ugly Chinese abroad, and the nation itself, full of sound and fury, like a slithering dragon emitting flames.

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Published: 19 Feb 2015, 02:28 PM IST
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