Given China’s vast consumer base, locals increasingly fear being outspent. They also complain that their orderly, law-abiding culture is being eroded by uncouth, rapacious visitors. When arguments break out, Hong Kongers call the mainlanders locusts, and the mainlanders dismiss the locals as lapdogs of the British.

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To be someone of Chinese descent [visiting Hong Kong] who speaks Mandarin and English but not Cantonese is to experience a double foreignness, and two subtly different kinds of suspicion: if I spoke English, I was assumed to be a Westerner, which meant being treated with wary deference but also being outrageously overcharged; speaking Mandarin was worse, eliciting a distrust that bordered on contempt.