It’s not just the election of the city’s chief executive that some Hongkongers want the mainlanders to butt out of, it seems.
According to reports, recent elections to the student union at Hong Kong University descended into a xenophobic smear campaign that has since been condemned by China’s Communist Party.
Reuters reports that after a young woman running for election was outed in a student TV report as being a former member of the Communist Party Youth League, she was subjected to online abuse and accused of being a spy for Beijing.
State-run newspaper, the Communist Party’s People Daily, jumped to the girl’s defence, claiming Hong Kong’s 150,000 mainland students are “being treated unfairly as collateral targets” and being subjected to a dangerous “McCarthyite” trend.
Meanwhile, another student running for election who admitted his grandfather was a Communist Party member saw his face blurred with that of Mao’s in bright red fliers.
The accompanying caption read: “Beware of the Communists, be careful when you vote!”
Incidentally, his cabinet won anyway.
According to official government data, HKU hosted more mainland students last year than any of the city’s publicly funded universities – nearly 3,000, making up 16 percent of the student population.
