HKers and HK as a hugh shopping mall

Comments on a post titled China's often forgotten SAR on the blog of a Fulbright scholar, Gina, living in Shanghai:

I was absolutely not surprised that the HK speaker spoke lowly of the mainland and mainlanders, which represents a general and persistent views of the majority of HK people. For more than a century, they have always been the others of HK people. On the one hand, we are Chinese, in some way more Chinese; on the other, we are not quite Chinese, and some are even proud of being illiterate in Chinese (definitely not native in any other languages). You may call these people unspoken self-claimed Upper Chinese but not many people might agree. They prefer Hong Kongers. After all, HK is just a floating conception (more or less like a hugh 'but packed' shopping mall, see below), HKers even worse, flexible to the extreme. 

After the SARS, tens of millions of mainlanders have been travelling to HK. They have been consistently described as shoppers, super rich shopaholics, to the extent that they have largely outnumbered wealthy locals and expats to be pure shopping kings and queens. Shop assistants nowadays speak better Mandarin than Cantonese. (What a joke!) Furthermore, they are never considered to appreciate the hybrid cultures and colonial landscape in the same way we do. In fact, the majority of HKers traveling aboard are also crazy shoppers looking for designer brands and bargains. The way we look down on mainlanders is in par with the way Parisians see us.

Indeed, mainlanders have boosted the post-SARS economy. But since mainlanders are still regarded as shoppers and nothing more, thanks to the media, and behave almost exactly the same as we expected (littering and spitting) and we see uncivilized 'others', no wonder the speaker used 'backward' to describe the mainland and mainlanders. It is equally important to point out that HKers travelled to the mainland to buy cheap / pirated stuff but mainlanders came to bought up LV and Chanel. By and large, HK is a hugh shopping mall. People come and go in every single min.

HKers have been benefited from cheap food and water from the mainland (expensive as in the mainland but a lot cheaper compared to import food). In other words, it seems to me that HKers refuse to acknowledge the fact that we were brought up by Britain, but we were, still is, fed up by the Mainland. These are the problems of HKers. Yes, I am a genuine HKer.