HONG KONG – Hong Kongers sometimes call themselves the 「people beneath Lion Rock,」 after the ragged peak that looms over the peninsula joining Hong Kong to mainland China.

At the mountain's base is the leafy suburb of Kowloon Tong. It has never been a big tourist draw, but in the decade since territorial control returned to China, this quintessentially Hong Kong neighborhood has had many more visitors – and important changes.

Of the two barracks that used to house British troops here, one lies empty and neglected, visited only by a cleaning woman who goes to sweep up the People's Liberation Army, though Chinese uniforms are rarely seen.
But the mainland presence is incapable in many other places. At the local rail station, where the Hong Kong subway links with the train from Guangdong Province, raucous crowds of mainlanders spill onto the platforms, and jam the escalators with huge suitcases.

Since the British handed over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, skyscrapers have gone up and down; momentous political battles have been fought. But few developments have affected the average Hong Kongers more than the opening of the border with the mainland.

Since 1997, more than half a million mainlanders have been allowed to move here, and 13.6 million visit each year – almost double the population. Meanwhile, the number of people who live on one side of the border and work on the other has soared – to 500,000 from about 50,000 in the early 1990s. In their journey into one of the world's open and affluent economies, they have reshaped just about every aspect of life here.

Migration from the mainland is hardly new. But for decades, it was defined by revolution and political turmoil on one side of the 「bamboo curtain,」 while a British colony prospered on the other. Most of the old migrants were refugees, fleeing poverty, famine, Communism and persecution across a fortified international border. Many swam here. Post-1997 migrants, by contrast, are more likely to be legal workers, professionals and university students.

Hong Kongers now shop across the old border in Shenzhen. Cross-border marriages are on the rise. Hong Kong's incessant street chatter has become trilingual: Cantonese, English and the mainland's lingua franca, Mandarin.

And then there are the commuters.

「There are about half a million people crossing that border regularly, and they are not tourists,」 said Michael DeGolyer of Hong Kong Baptist University.

If local anxiety once centered on the Chinese government, now it is on how the city will accommodate the new arrivals. The 「biliterate, trilingual」 policy in schools, once feared, now seen to have been accepted as an asset, but the local news media blame the mainlanders for crime, disease, undercutting the job market.

『There is definitely discrimination,」 said Sze Lai-shan, a mainland-born social worker who runs the New Immigrants Project for the Society for Community Organization, a nonprofit group in Hong Kong. 「They go to a job interview and the employer hears the mainland accent in their Cantonese. Even if the job doesn't require much talking or use of Cantonese, they won't be hired. And if they are hired, they will be paid less.」