Hong Kong pop-up mall aims to ease tensions over mainland shoppers

But, in Hong Kong, plans for the first temporary mall are 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, jewellery and other goods they can sell back home for a profit.

Now two of Hong Kong’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, said 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.

SHKP said that if the plan was approved by the government, they would lease the land for a nominal HK$1 ($0.13) per square metre 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 organised 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 said.