> This is in no way a defense of the despicable treatment many mainland Chinese have experienced in Hong Kong. That is indefensible, and it is shameful in an otherwise liberal society. But it is just that, an exception to the rule in a liberal society being squeezed relentlessly by the mainland government—and most lately by the Hong Kong government itself, which no longer makes its own decisions.

It is hardly an exception.
Being a HK born, and lived abroad, I've seen exactly the same kind of discrimination that the previous poster had mentioned, the ones toward mainlanders.

When I was working in HK, I've heard barbs behind my back about how I'm here stealing jobs. Online, I've seen barbs about how just because people like me have "the 3 stars", the right of abode, it doesn't mean that people like me are Hong Kongers.

During my time there, I got along with the mainlanders working in the office because of these reasons. They throw barbs behind my back, but when they have no choice but needed my help, either they put on a thin veneer of civility, or couldn't simply be forthright about it.

They believe the reasons why HKers from overseas advance in their career because of who they are, but never questioned why. Perhaps they done more work that delivered more value, willing to take risks for their career, instead of relying on this magical status of "studying abroad".

A lot of Hong Kongers feel inferior compared to others, and it partly has to do with the education system - largely a carry over from the Colonial days that punishes students severely from being "wrong", stifling creative thinking and risk taking; and partly has to do with Hong Kongers in general with their discriminatory streak.

> The increase in anti-mainland sentiment seems to me to correlate closely with the fear of Chinese government encroachment on Hong Kong's institutions, and outright attacks on those institutions and values.

This is the lie that Hong Kongers like to tell themselves. The anti-mainland sentiment had always been around. The word 阿燦[1] came to be in the late 70s. That dark undercurrent had always been there, alongside the discrimination towards Filipino and Indonesian maids and their treatment. New slang term came up and took their place, dehumanizing them to locusts, or start calling them derogatory terms dating back to WW2.

A Bangladeshi-Canadian friend of mine and I just visited last year. He knew he was going to be discriminated upon in China, but was taken aback by the amount of discrimination he had seen in Hong Kong. He recounted about how daggers were coming out of peoples' eyes, even your typical servers at a restaurant, and they had only relented when he spoke in Canadian English. This is particularly telling, because they had expected him to speak in an South Asian accent, and already lumped him into that group that had always been looked down upon.

You can see this with the initial protests, outside of government buildings, it's typically in TST / MK, where a lot of mainland tourists tends to shop; and border towns in NT where mainland grey-market buyers tend to grab milk formula. And this went on full-display when they occupied the airport, and held the two mainlanders. The protesters said that they had been anxious of instigators, but the fact of the matter is, their discriminatory sense was on full display, and if one were to look at it at the point of view of the protest-supporter, it was a colossal strategic mistake.

> Hong Kong has a very "western" culture (for lack of a better term, because Hong Kong certainly has a heady mix of Chinese, British and American culture, with the rest of Asia sprinkled in).
By this, you mean if one were White, they'd look at them fondly. If one had dark skin, then they'd look down on them, either because they're labourers, e.g. Filipino / Indonesian maids at near indentured-servitude; or part of the people segregated into their own enclaves.

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Articles like these masks the core problems underneath, the deep-seated discrimination that had been festering for decades. The sentiments that HK has a western culture, or it was liberal, or democratic, and had it taken from them ignores a lot of the realities on the ground, and history. Colonial HK only got its first indirect-election in '85 [2], after the Joint-Declaration; the first direct election in '91 [3]. The article lamented that the LegCo wasn't 100% directly elected, but rarely people look back and figure out that the functional constituency [4] is from the Colonial days, and pro-democratic leaders like Martin Lee and Szeto Wah was elected through the FC in '85 [2]

1: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E7%87%A6
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Hong_Kong_legislative_ele...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Hong_Kong_legislative_ele...
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_...