HONG KONG, June 23 — Old-time Hong Kongers sometimes call themselves the “people beneath Lion Rock,” after the ragged peak that looms over the peninsula joining Hong Kong to mainland China.
At the mountain’s base is the leafy suburb of Kowloon Tong. It has never been a big tourist draw, but in the decade since territorial control returned to China, this quintessentially Hong Kong neighborhood has had many more visitors — and important changes.
Of the two barracks that used to house British troops here, one lies empty and neglected, visited only by a cleaning woman who goes to sweep up the leaves. The other now belongs to the People’s Liberation Army, though Chinese uniforms are rarely seen.
But the mainland presence is inescapable in many other places. At the local rail station, where the Hong Kong subway links with the train from Guangdong Province, raucous crowds of mainlanders spill onto the platforms, and jam the escalators with huge suitcases. Police officers hover and check identification cards.
In the shopping mall connected to the station, mainland tourists snap up designer goods. The nearby university is registering more mainland students than ever.
Since the British handed over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, skyscrapers have gone up and down; momentous political battles have been fought. But few developments have affected the average Hong Konger more than the opening of the border with the mainland.
Since 1997, more than half a million mainlanders have been allowed to move here, and 13.6 million visit each year — almost double the resident population. Meanwhile, the number of people who live on one side of the border and work on the other has soared — to 500,000 from about 50,000 in the early 1990s.
In their journey into one of the world’s most open and affluent economies, the mainlanders bring their own distinctive dialects, ways and aspirations. They have reshaped just about every aspect of life here — from the conduct of business and social life, to commuting, marriage and education.
Migration from the mainland is hardly new. But for decades, it was defined by revolution and political turmoil on one side of the “bamboo curtain,” while a British colony prospered on the other. Most of the old migrants were refugees, fleeing poverty, famine, Communism and persecution across a fortified international border. Many swam here.
Post-1997 migrants, by contrast, are more likely to be legal workers, professionals and university students.
Hong Kongers now shop across the old border in Shenzhen as casually as American families drive to a mall in another town. Cross-border marriages are on the rise. Hong Kong’s incessant street chatter has become trilingual: Cantonese, English and the mainland’s lingua franca, Mandarin.
Even Hong Kong’s famed action movies have changed: if four gangsters plot a killing, two speak Cantonese and two argue back in Mandarin.
And then there are the commuters.
“There are about half a million people crossing that border regularly, and they are not tourists,” said Michael DeGolyer of Hong Kong Baptist University, who has traced social and political changes since 1989 through the Hong Kong Transition Project.
One regular crosser is Chan Tit-keung, a Hong Kong taxi driver who now lives near Shenzhen.
“I live in a big, 1,000-square-foot flat by myself, and you can get a nice place for 2,000 yuan” a month, or about $250, he said. “You can’t afford a place like that in Hong Kong. I live outside the city, so the air is cleaner. And on my days off, I can go for long walks.”
But he is less happy to see mainlanders moving into Hong Kong in search of higher wages — helping to lower them. Hong Kong has no legal minimum wage.
“Before, it was easier for older guys like us to find casual work in Hong Kong, and now it’s harder,” he said. “It’s because the mainland workers have come down” in the wages they accept for their work. Mr. Chan identifies himself as Hong Kong Chinese, to set himself apart from his mainland neighbors.
“People there squat on the ground and smoke everywhere and fight in the bars, which is why I don’t really go out when I’m on the mainland,” he said. “And when I have to see a doctor, I come back down over the border with my Hong Kong ID card.”
After the shock of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Hong Kongers emigrated in large numbers to Western countries. As China’s political situation has stabilized and its economy surged, ?migr?s have been returning.
Lau Tak-man, who runs a bookstore in the bustling Tsim Sha Tsui district, moved to New Zealand with her children in the early 1990s. But she eventually returned, saying things were “more relaxed.”
“The spirit here is better,” she said, as customers streamed in and out of her shop late one evening.
If local anxiety once centered on the Chinese government, now it is on how the city will accommodate the new arrivals. The “biliterate, trilingual” policy in schools, once feared, now seems to have been accepted as an asset, but the local news media blame the mainlanders for crime, disease, undercutting the job market. They highlight stories of the large numbers of pregnant mainlanders crossing the border to give birth here and so guarantee their children rights to permanent residence.
“There is definitely discrimination,” said Sze Lai-shan, a mainland-born social worker who runs the New Immigrants Project for the Society for Community Organization, a nonprofit group in Hong Kong. “They go to a job interview and the employer hears the mainland accent on their Cantonese. Even if the job doesn’t require much talking or use of Cantonese, they won’t be hired. And if they are hired, they will be paid less.”
A study that Ms. Sze’s group released in 2003 showed that mainland women tended to be employed as cleaners, garbage collectors and kitchen workers, with little legal protection for their rights. Nearly half were working seven days a week.
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