Anti-locust ad to fuel Mainland tensions

After calls to halt tensions between Hong Kong and Mainland citizens, members of the Hong Kong Golden Forum have carried through on their promise to advertise their frustrations with Mainland Chinese in mainstream media outlets.Jimmy Lai's Next Media has today carried the full page advertisement in its two daily newspapers Apple Daily and Sharp Daily, which refer to Mainland Chinese as “locusts” who swarm the city and drain its resources.The ad also aims to halt the "unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women in Hong Kong" and for Mainland Chinese to "respect" Hong Kong culture."That's enough!," the ads scream. "Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!"The full page ad which depicts a locust looking at the Hong Kong skyline, also ran with the following statements."We tolerate your scrambling for infant formulas because we know that you are victims of poisonous milk powder."We share education resources with you because we know that China's education system is backward. We use simplified Chinese in the following line because we know that you cannot read traditional Chinese."Please respect our culture when you are here in Hong Kong, you couldn't live without Hong Kong."It follows weeks of tensions between the Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong citizens, after Kong Qing-Dong, a professor at Peking University called HongKongers "running dogs for British imperialists."The HKGolden Forum calls itself one of the top online discussion boards in Hong Kong, gathering a "loyal base of Tech Savvy consumers, IT Professionals and Enthusiasts who are energetic, expressive and opinion leader in the community."The forum covers topics from IT, to academic affairs, sports, travel, entertainment and now, more than ever, social issues.Apart from today's print ads, the group has turned to Facebook where it is attracting a lot of attention.So far more than 102,000 people have joined a Facebook group It's Time to Say No, with more than 20,000 conversations taking place around the Facebook page.Denny Ho Kwok-leung, associate professor at Polytechnic University's Department of Applied Social Science, told the South China Morning Post that placing the ad in a mainstream newspaper indicated the row was unlikely to end any time soon.The group claimed to have raised HK$100,000 in less than a week to run the ads. Full page ad in Apple Daily run at around HK$50,000, with a half page at $26,000.Apple Daily told Marketing that protest ads were allowed on its front page, but they are subject to approval from editorial and its team of lawyers. Posting an ad in the main news section is not as restrictive.