Price and tastiness have an inverse relationship in Hong Kong. Contrary to common logic, shelling out at a sit-down restaurant on the upper levels of a high-end shopping plaza will not guarantee you a better meal than what they’re selling down on the street.
Most of the greatest meals you’ll have in Hong Kong are in steamy alleyway stalls, jabbing elbows with the stranger next to you while slurping down food that cost as much as the change rattling in your wallet. In fact, Hong Kong boasts the location of the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in the world.
This isn’t to say that all restaurants in Hong Kong are in a race to the bottom to pitch the cheapest meals to customers but rather speaks of the scale of and working class base of these establishments. Their success was not achieved by adding “high-end,” fad ingredients that many burgeoning restaurants in the United States now advertise. Instead, these establishments have become such highly respected members of their communities because of their focus on technique, recipe, and relying on the support from working class patrons that will provide a generation of loyalty and support.
But Hong Kong’s small business culture, the culture at the center of Hong Kong’s traditional commercial and culinary industries, is being threatened.
Over the past two decades, Hong Kongers have seen their favorite mom-and-pop restaurants and stores shutter close and their storefronts razed to build glassy malls crammed with luxury Western brands. Even chain stores for and by locals infringe upon the corners that used to house the block’s favorite congee house or barbecued pork.
The edging out of traditional Hong Kong life is being felt in homes and countrysides too, where old living complexes and agricultural land is consistently paved over and redeveloped for high-end and increasingly unaffordable housing units.
Many Hong Kongers attribute this change largely to influence from mainland China. They consider the chief executive of their government a lapdog to Beijing’s economic and political interests, and many resent the tidal wave of mainland tourists that swarm to Hong Kong on weekends to snatch up infant formula and brand-name bags from the malls built especially to attract them. And it is exactly because luxury and Western brands have become lucrative businesses to the influx of mainland tourists and Beijing's interest in economic development that small businesses are being squeezed out into the periphery.
Other factors, unrelated to the mainland, may also be contributing to the stark changes Hong Kongers are experiencing. Land and commercial monopolies held by rich business moguls, like richest-man-in-Asia Li Ka-shing, have and will continue to impact Hong Kong’s future. Their financial interests will dictate the development of huge swaths of land, a considerable amount of which has already been redeveloped into malls and luxury condos.
Taken together, this means that while Hong Kong, the intangible, nonliving idea, is thriving, the real, average Hong Konger is living in the most unaffordable city in the world whose environment is increasingly not reflecting their interests.
However, the Hong Kong small business is by no means an endangered species, and Hong Kongers would never allow them to become one. Localist movements, like the Umbrella Revolution in late 2014 and the Fishball Riot just earlier this year, prove that Hong Kongers are fighting back. Hong Kongers, many of them young and frustrated, have joined the surge of localist movements to rally against the infringement of their sovereignty by Beijing and to aggressively defend their Hong Kong identity.
Even those not directly supporting the localist movements are compelled to support their local small business culture. Those that I’ve spoken to admit that local products and stores may be more expensive, but they take a profound pride in helping their Hong Kong culture thrive. At the Chinese University in Hong Kong, a group of local students have established an organization called “A Store in CUHK” to connect students to these small businesses to both help students discover local gems and to support struggling businesses.
While Hong Kongers should have never had to see some of their dearest local cultural institutions go to realize this, these threats have revealed their heart of spirit and resilience. As one local friend poignantly reflected, “I think there’s good in this, too. It makes us more appreciative of just how special and important this culture is to us.”
Lauren Hiller graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in 2017 with a major in regional and comparative studies and a focus on Asia. While abroad in Hong Kong during the spring 2016 semester, she blogged for the Junior Year Abroad Network, contributed to the advocacy for minority groups in the city, and organized a dialogue series to increase awareness for local issues and promote intercultural exchange.
