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Localists And “Locusts” In Hong Kong: Creating A Yellow-Red Peril Discourse, Barry Sautman, Hairong Yan

Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies

Hong Kong’s “localists” depict mainlanders as locusts ruining the territory and bringing an end to a vaunted way of life.

In this article, we first discuss anti-mainlander prejudice in Hong Kong and its resemblance to earlier biases by Shanghai people against Chinese from neighboring provinces. We then empirically test claims localists make about the mainlander presence in Hong Kong and show that mainland visitors and migrants are not working the harms attributed to them. There follows a review of “insect language” as integral to racial vilification in several settings, with Hong Kong’s anti-locust movement a recent example. We go on …