Hong Kong | FT: Pop-up mall aims to ease tensions over mainland shoppers

Shoppers sort through items in Sheung Shui district near the border with mainland China

From London’s trendy Shoreditch to a downtown revitalization project in Las Vegas, pop-up shopping malls have become all the rage among urbanites keen to sample craft beer and buy designer sneakers.
But according to a Financial Times article published yesterday, in Hong Kong, plans for the first temporary mall are being designed to assuage popular anger with visiting shoppers from mainland China — derided by locals as “locusts” — rather than cater to the whims of hipsters.
As political tensions between Hong Kong and Beijing have risen, the semi-autonomous Chinese territory has seen a growing backlash against the thousands of “parallel traders” who come from the mainland every day in search of cheap baby milk, jewelry and other goods they can sell back home for a profit.
The article by Ben Bland and Gloria Cheung in Hong Kong reports that two of the city’s biggest property developers have teamed up with lawmakers to turn a car park near the Chinese border into a mall made out of shipping containers that is meant to serve mainland visitors attracted by the city’s low-tax shopping.
Wong Ting-kwong, one of the legislative council members promoting the project, told the FT it would “reduce the nuisance brought by excessive mainland tourists and relieve the traffic inside the city”.
Mr Wong is a member of the main pro-Beijing political party in Hong Kong, which has frequently come under attack for failing to defend residents’ interests in the face of pressure from the central government in China.
He hopes that the mall, which will be about the size of two football pitches, according to a recently submitted planning application, will open for business early next year.
The land for the pop-up mall is jointly owned by Henderson Land and Sun Hung Kai Properties, which are controlled respectively by Hong Kong billionaires Lee Shau-kee and the Kwok brothers.
According to the paper, SHKP said that if the plan was approved by the government, they would lease the land for a nominal HK$1 (USD0.13) per square meter to a charitable foundation, which would run the pop-up mall on a non-profit basis for two years.
After that period, the developers expect to remove the shipping containers and start construction of a permanent mall on the same site.
The initiative has succeeded in grabbing the headlines in Hong Kong, but those who have organized protests against mainland shoppers are far from convinced it will solve their problem.
Ray Wong, a member of HK Indigenous, a group that campaigns against mainland Chinese influence in Hong Kong, said that while the pop-up mall could alleviate some pressures, it could also disturb local residents if it generated too much traffic.
“I think the root of the problem is that mainlanders don’t trust Chinese goods so they have to turn to Hong Kong for guaranteed quality,” he told the FT.