Pressure on newly married women to quickly get pregnant, complicated divorces, and the risk of less access to abortions: An increasingly conservative China is trying to push women back into the home. Yet female emancipation has a long tradition in the People’s Republic, as journalist and author Leta Hong Fincher, who specializes in women’s rights, explains in an interview with Christiane Kuehl.
She believes the Chinese revolution was more feminist than other socialist revolutions. This is one of the reasons why older women in higher positions are standing in the way of the party’s swing towards a more traditional role for women. And it’s not just them, according to Fincher, younger women also oppose the change and say “no” to marriage and children.
Our second text deals with the natural disaster in north-east China. On Tuesday night, the region was struck by a severe earthquake. More than 100 people lost their lives, many more were injured and countless buildings were damaged or collapsed. However, unlike previous disasters, rescue and relief efforts got underway quickly this time. The government has learned from previous mistakes, reports Joern Petring.
At the recent plenum of the Chinese Women’s Association, which only meets every five years, President Xi Jinping called for a new childbirth and family culture. Officials call for a higher birth rate. This is a new direction in the Communist Party, which has always waved the banner of equality, at least verbally. What’s going on?
This has been a long time coming. Xi has made comments in the past about how China has to develop more of a ‘family culture’ and family values. The CCP has long been paying lip service to equality but in reality, the party – which is, of course, male-dominated – has for many years been pushing women to return to the home and assume their duties as wives and mothers.
Ten years ago, you wrote a book on women’s rights in China entitled Sheng-nu – “Leftover Women,” which will soon be reprinted. Where does the term come from?
The term was coined for unmarried women in their late 20s by a propaganda campaign which has been pushed through the channels in 2007 when Hu Jintao was China’s leader.
This means that it wasn’t Xi who started the conservative course – which, to a certain extent, contradicts socialist ideology.
That concept of equality is certainly inherent to Communism. And it really became especially pronounced in China, with Mao Zedong famously saying that ‘women hold up half the sky.’ The Chinese revolution was much more feminist than other socialist revolutions. That is related to Chinese revolutionary history prior to Communism, at the turn of the 20th century.
In what way?
The whole period before and after toppling the Imperial system was very feminist. Many Chinese Communists grew out of the May 4th Movement in 1919, of which feminism and women’s rights were a big part. That part of history and the rebellion against China’s Confucian patriarchal past really made many early Communists, including men, really embrace women’s rights. I did not see that kind of parallel in other communist revolutions.
How did this feminist element manifest?
In the early era, women were assigned jobs and assigned to work in the countryside. So that is a very strong feminist legacy and a legacy of full employment for women. The Soviet Union criticized this element at the time. Now, many of the women who worked in the Mao era are still alive, so this element of feminism is entrenched in family histories. All the women were working, and some even became quite senior in the government or prominent businesswomen in China – they represent the history of Communist China. It is quite hard for the Party now to fight that element, as these women are in the Communist Party. They are all around.
Yet the party continues to shift towards a more traditional role for women. Is this mainly because the birth rate has been falling for years? The party has also abolished the one-child policy; today it has a three-child policy.
What you see in the birth rates and marriage rates plummeting is that young women, particularly the ones with college degrees, are really saying no to pro-marriage and pro-natal policies. That is the biggest change over the last decade. And that huge demographic change is a result of changing attitudes among young women.
How is the government dealing with it?
It is clear that the government is going to come up with more intrusive methods trying to prod educated Han Chinese women to get married and have children. And it’s quite ominous to think what may happen next. But, what gives me a lot of hope is that China is not a totalitarian state. It cannot just force women – yet – to marry and have babies.
What about abortion, which is currently legal and was even promoted in the past?
Of course, this question arises. Is the government going to make abortion harder? I think that is entirely possible. Xi Jinping is a dictator; if he wanted to, he could just say let’s ban abortion, and let’s make it very difficult for young women to get contraception. But that would be a very bad idea, as I think it would backfire.
What is the role of older women? Do they also exert pressure on young women? The ones who actually belong to the emancipated generation?
Here, the power of the Communist Party and the state also comes into play. From all the research I have done, I do not believe this is a cultural phenomenon. I know that the older generation, parents and other relatives, who are pushing their young daughters or nieces to get married and have children, do so in a collective effort. Because they are being told to do so by the government, increasingly. It’s a multipronged policy.
Propaganda plays a very important role. A lot of that is aimed especially at the older generations. It tells them how important it is that they push young daughters, nieces or granddaughters to get married. Thus, the societal pressure is very intense. And I think this is going to be a key way for the CCP to insert itself more into family decisions. I have read that local government officials are calling newlyweds and asking whether the woman is pregnant. I think we are going to see a lot more of that.
What does that do to the young women?
Unfortunately, I think that this pressure is going to affect young women who might otherwise say ‘no’ to marriage and children. Pressure is very powerful when it comes from your own parents; mothers in particular play a very strong role. It’s kind of a ‘moral kidnapping’ as someone has put it to me a short while ago. In a country like China that values ‘filial piety’ so much, it is very hard when your own mom is begging you to get married. But I am still sure that many millions of young women will continue to say ‘no.’
Divorce used to be surprisingly easy in China.
That was the case in the past. But the government is also making it exceedingly difficult for women to get divorced. In 2021, it introduced the divorce-going off-period. For some years already, it has been much more difficult to get a divorce now if the man doesn’t want to grant the divorce. This is the case even if the husband is a proven abuser. When you’re married in China, you are now almost trapped. So if you are not married, this is going to deter you from getting married in the first place.
Social media has played a big role in making feminism more accessible or denouncing cases of harassment. Since then, censorship has increased significantly. How much has the online feminist movement suffered as a result?
In spite of a very aggressive anti-feminist crackdown, the government hasn’t been able to wipe out feminism at all. Because it is so popular. That’s what I mean when I say that China is not a totalitarian system. It is very authoritarian, and has become much more repressive under XJP. And censorship of feminist activism and women’s rights on the internet is much greater than it used to be. But this content is much more pervasive.
What is the effect?
Unless you have a complete internet blackout, there are always going to be these spaces for feminist discourse. Feminist voices are often drowned out by misogynistic nationalistic voices. Yet the women’s voices are still there, there are simply too many of them. Prominent feminist accounts are always getting deleted. But there are so many young women starting new accounts. It is a brutal anti-feminist crackdown, but still insufficient to wipe out these feminist trends among young women.
Despite its subtle feminist message, Barbie made it into China’s cinemas and the film was very successful in China.
It is pretty amazing that Barbie escaped censorship. Actually, the decision to show Barbie was due to a real oversight. They didn’t get it. But a lot of the women who watched it did.
Leta Hong Fincher is an American author and expert on women’s rights in China. She has worked as a journalist in China for many years and holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Beijing Tsinghua University. The revised edition of her first book “Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China,” which was recently republished on the 10th anniversary of her first book, was named one of the best books of 2023 by the China Books Review. She also wrote the book “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China”. Fincher is currently a research associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York.
A severe earthquake in northwest China on Tuesday night claimed the lives of at least 126 people. A heavy earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 struck Jishishan County in Gansu Province, but also affected the neighboring province of Qinghai. More than 500 people were injured.
The remote area is considered one of the poorest in China. Nevertheless, rescue work made rapid progress on Tuesday. After the first reports of the quake, it only took a few hours for the state media to broadcast footage of well-equipped rescue teams searching for victims and survivors in the rubble. Tent cities were set up, and relief supplies such as blankets and warm clothing were sent to the region.
Both President and Party Leader Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang spoke out immediately and called on aid workers to search tirelessly for survivors. The economic planners of the Beijing Development and Reform Commission also quickly announced the activation of an emergency plan to ensure the supply of energy, electricity and daily necessities in the affected region. The government allocated 200 million yuan (almost 26 million euros) for disaster relief, including 150 million yuan for Gansu and 50 million yuan for Qinghai.
A giant undertaking was set in motion, again showing that China has learned its lesson from previous disasters. The memories of the great Wenchuan quake in Sichuan, which killed more than 70,000 people in 2008, are deeply rooted in the collective memory of the Chinese people.
Despite knowledge of the seismic activity in the region, emergency preparations and responses were grossly insufficient at the time, leading to delayed rescue operations and care for those affected. Many buildings, especially schools and homes, were not built to withstand earthquakes. Numerous buildings collapsed, burying people under the debris. The term “tofu school” made the rounds.
Much has changed since then. Although earthquake tragedies have repeatedly occurred, the number of victims has tended to decrease since Wenchuan.
This earthquake is obviously also a huge tragedy for the people in Gansu. Chinese state media showed photos of people fleeing from their homes into the winter cold after the quake, wrapped in blankets and waiting outside. The freezing temperatures of up to minus 13 degrees Celsius were particularly hard on those in need of help as well as rescuers on Tuesday.
Eyewitnesses told the state news agency Xinhua that the earthquake in Jishishan had caused damage to roads and other infrastructure. Over 6000 houses in Jishishan were also damaged. Some homes were destroyed entirely. Several villages lost power and the water supply was interrupted.
“We are still in shock,” a man from Jishishan told the local news portal Jimu around two hours after the earthquake. He and his family had rushed down the stairs from their apartment on the 16th floor and then driven to safety by car.
Eyewitnesses said that the earthquake could also be felt in Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu. On social media, users shared videos of students in Lanzhou rushing out of their rooms during the night to get to safety. The next few days will show whether the worst is over or the number of victims will continue to rise.
Sinolytics is a European research-based consultancy entirely focused on China. It advises European companies on their strategic orientation and specific business activities in the People’s Republic.
His German is a bit rusty, Cobus van Staden replies to the question whether he speaks Japanese. “When I try to speak German, I always end up speaking Japanese.” So he hopes that the people he talks to will somehow magically understand Japanese. And his Chinese? He has learned the language, but doesn’t speak it particularly well. Van Staden’s last visit to China was several years ago; he has not returned since the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, the South African had traveled to China several times.
Van Staden’s interest in the People’s Republic was sparked while working on his PhD in philosophy and media studies at Nagoya University in Japan from 2001 to 2008. In Nagoya’s international community, he had more and more contact with people from China. Before his stay in Japan, van Staden had studied media studies and worked as a producer of documentary films.
But then Asia and Africa became van Staden’s primary focus. As a postdoc at the South African University of Stellenbosch and at the Sarchi Chair of African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the University of Johannesburg, he worked on a comparison of Chinese and Japanese public diplomacy in Africa. In 2013, he moved to the Department of Media Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, where he still teaches.
His academic research has focused on media coverage of China and Japan’s relations with Africa and the use of media as a public diplomacy tool in the Global South. He is also a Research Affiliate at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).
In 2010, Cobus van Staden and journalist Eric Olander founded the China Global South Project, which considers itself an “independent multimedia organization” providing information about China’s activities in the Global South, particularly in African countries. Until August 2019, it was a passion project for both of them, which they worked on after work and at weekends, as the website states. Today, they have a full-time team of editors and analysts in five countries in Africa and Asia who produce news and analysis every day. Van Staden is now officially Managing Editor.
The China Global South Project reports on China’s global activities in the form of podcasts and newsletters and strives to report as impartially as possible. It is financed by subscriptions. “Chinese media report everything positively, while Western media portray the whole thing as a huge conspiracy,” says van Staden. His project, on the other hand, aims to provide the most concrete, nuanced and evidence-based reporting possible on relations between China and the global South. The audience is a small niche consisting of diplomats, academics and students worldwide.
“I have seen that Western narratives about China and Africa are not really based on true analysis,” says van Staden. For example, it is often reported that China deliberately burdens economically weak countries with debt to gain leverage. “Leading researchers have refuted these allegations,” he says. Instead, Africa’s debt is owed to European private lenders, with higher interest rates than Chinese government loans. “China is being instrumentalized in this discourse.”
However, this does not mean there are no problems with the Chinese government. The problem is simply that the real issues are not being brought into focus because the media focus too much on the same old narratives. Van Staden’s motivation for his project is to set such narratives straight so that the world can once again deal with the real difficulties affecting African countries. Shoko Bethke
Food for the rebound: This is what is expected of these mainland visitors taking a stroll down Hong Kong’s Temple Street. The food stalls that are temporarily set up here are part of the so-called Evening Economy – promoted by the government in the hope of boosting the post-pandemic economy and increasing tourism revenue.
Pressure on newly married women to quickly get pregnant, complicated divorces, and the risk of less access to abortions: An increasingly conservative China is trying to push women back into the home. Yet female emancipation has a long tradition in the People’s Republic, as journalist and author Leta Hong Fincher, who specializes in women’s rights, explains in an interview with Christiane Kuehl.
She believes the Chinese revolution was more feminist than other socialist revolutions. This is one of the reasons why older women in higher positions are standing in the way of the party’s swing towards a more traditional role for women. And it’s not just them, according to Fincher, younger women also oppose the change and say “no” to marriage and children.
Our second text deals with the natural disaster in north-east China. On Tuesday night, the region was struck by a severe earthquake. More than 100 people lost their lives, many more were injured and countless buildings were damaged or collapsed. However, unlike previous disasters, rescue and relief efforts got underway quickly this time. The government has learned from previous mistakes, reports Joern Petring.
At the recent plenum of the Chinese Women’s Association, which only meets every five years, President Xi Jinping called for a new childbirth and family culture. Officials call for a higher birth rate. This is a new direction in the Communist Party, which has always waved the banner of equality, at least verbally. What’s going on?
This has been a long time coming. Xi has made comments in the past about how China has to develop more of a ‘family culture’ and family values. The CCP has long been paying lip service to equality but in reality, the party – which is, of course, male-dominated – has for many years been pushing women to return to the home and assume their duties as wives and mothers.
Ten years ago, you wrote a book on women’s rights in China entitled Sheng-nu – “Leftover Women,” which will soon be reprinted. Where does the term come from?
The term was coined for unmarried women in their late 20s by a propaganda campaign which has been pushed through the channels in 2007 when Hu Jintao was China’s leader.
This means that it wasn’t Xi who started the conservative course – which, to a certain extent, contradicts socialist ideology.
That concept of equality is certainly inherent to Communism. And it really became especially pronounced in China, with Mao Zedong famously saying that ‘women hold up half the sky.’ The Chinese revolution was much more feminist than other socialist revolutions. That is related to Chinese revolutionary history prior to Communism, at the turn of the 20th century.
In what way?
The whole period before and after toppling the Imperial system was very feminist. Many Chinese Communists grew out of the May 4th Movement in 1919, of which feminism and women’s rights were a big part. That part of history and the rebellion against China’s Confucian patriarchal past really made many early Communists, including men, really embrace women’s rights. I did not see that kind of parallel in other communist revolutions.
How did this feminist element manifest?
In the early era, women were assigned jobs and assigned to work in the countryside. So that is a very strong feminist legacy and a legacy of full employment for women. The Soviet Union criticized this element at the time. Now, many of the women who worked in the Mao era are still alive, so this element of feminism is entrenched in family histories. All the women were working, and some even became quite senior in the government or prominent businesswomen in China – they represent the history of Communist China. It is quite hard for the Party now to fight that element, as these women are in the Communist Party. They are all around.
Yet the party continues to shift towards a more traditional role for women. Is this mainly because the birth rate has been falling for years? The party has also abolished the one-child policy; today it has a three-child policy.
What you see in the birth rates and marriage rates plummeting is that young women, particularly the ones with college degrees, are really saying no to pro-marriage and pro-natal policies. That is the biggest change over the last decade. And that huge demographic change is a result of changing attitudes among young women.
How is the government dealing with it?
It is clear that the government is going to come up with more intrusive methods trying to prod educated Han Chinese women to get married and have children. And it’s quite ominous to think what may happen next. But, what gives me a lot of hope is that China is not a totalitarian state. It cannot just force women – yet – to marry and have babies.
What about abortion, which is currently legal and was even promoted in the past?
Of course, this question arises. Is the government going to make abortion harder? I think that is entirely possible. Xi Jinping is a dictator; if he wanted to, he could just say let’s ban abortion, and let’s make it very difficult for young women to get contraception. But that would be a very bad idea, as I think it would backfire.
What is the role of older women? Do they also exert pressure on young women? The ones who actually belong to the emancipated generation?
Here, the power of the Communist Party and the state also comes into play. From all the research I have done, I do not believe this is a cultural phenomenon. I know that the older generation, parents and other relatives, who are pushing their young daughters or nieces to get married and have children, do so in a collective effort. Because they are being told to do so by the government, increasingly. It’s a multipronged policy.
Propaganda plays a very important role. A lot of that is aimed especially at the older generations. It tells them how important it is that they push young daughters, nieces or granddaughters to get married. Thus, the societal pressure is very intense. And I think this is going to be a key way for the CCP to insert itself more into family decisions. I have read that local government officials are calling newlyweds and asking whether the woman is pregnant. I think we are going to see a lot more of that.
What does that do to the young women?
Unfortunately, I think that this pressure is going to affect young women who might otherwise say ‘no’ to marriage and children. Pressure is very powerful when it comes from your own parents; mothers in particular play a very strong role. It’s kind of a ‘moral kidnapping’ as someone has put it to me a short while ago. In a country like China that values ‘filial piety’ so much, it is very hard when your own mom is begging you to get married. But I am still sure that many millions of young women will continue to say ‘no.’
Divorce used to be surprisingly easy in China.
That was the case in the past. But the government is also making it exceedingly difficult for women to get divorced. In 2021, it introduced the divorce-going off-period. For some years already, it has been much more difficult to get a divorce now if the man doesn’t want to grant the divorce. This is the case even if the husband is a proven abuser. When you’re married in China, you are now almost trapped. So if you are not married, this is going to deter you from getting married in the first place.
Social media has played a big role in making feminism more accessible or denouncing cases of harassment. Since then, censorship has increased significantly. How much has the online feminist movement suffered as a result?
In spite of a very aggressive anti-feminist crackdown, the government hasn’t been able to wipe out feminism at all. Because it is so popular. That’s what I mean when I say that China is not a totalitarian system. It is very authoritarian, and has become much more repressive under XJP. And censorship of feminist activism and women’s rights on the internet is much greater than it used to be. But this content is much more pervasive.
What is the effect?
Unless you have a complete internet blackout, there are always going to be these spaces for feminist discourse. Feminist voices are often drowned out by misogynistic nationalistic voices. Yet the women’s voices are still there, there are simply too many of them. Prominent feminist accounts are always getting deleted. But there are so many young women starting new accounts. It is a brutal anti-feminist crackdown, but still insufficient to wipe out these feminist trends among young women.
Despite its subtle feminist message, Barbie made it into China’s cinemas and the film was very successful in China.
It is pretty amazing that Barbie escaped censorship. Actually, the decision to show Barbie was due to a real oversight. They didn’t get it. But a lot of the women who watched it did.
Leta Hong Fincher is an American author and expert on women’s rights in China. She has worked as a journalist in China for many years and holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Beijing Tsinghua University. The revised edition of her first book “Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China,” which was recently republished on the 10th anniversary of her first book, was named one of the best books of 2023 by the China Books Review. She also wrote the book “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China”. Fincher is currently a research associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York.
A severe earthquake in northwest China on Tuesday night claimed the lives of at least 126 people. A heavy earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 struck Jishishan County in Gansu Province, but also affected the neighboring province of Qinghai. More than 500 people were injured.
The remote area is considered one of the poorest in China. Nevertheless, rescue work made rapid progress on Tuesday. After the first reports of the quake, it only took a few hours for the state media to broadcast footage of well-equipped rescue teams searching for victims and survivors in the rubble. Tent cities were set up, and relief supplies such as blankets and warm clothing were sent to the region.
Both President and Party Leader Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang spoke out immediately and called on aid workers to search tirelessly for survivors. The economic planners of the Beijing Development and Reform Commission also quickly announced the activation of an emergency plan to ensure the supply of energy, electricity and daily necessities in the affected region. The government allocated 200 million yuan (almost 26 million euros) for disaster relief, including 150 million yuan for Gansu and 50 million yuan for Qinghai.
A giant undertaking was set in motion, again showing that China has learned its lesson from previous disasters. The memories of the great Wenchuan quake in Sichuan, which killed more than 70,000 people in 2008, are deeply rooted in the collective memory of the Chinese people.
Despite knowledge of the seismic activity in the region, emergency preparations and responses were grossly insufficient at the time, leading to delayed rescue operations and care for those affected. Many buildings, especially schools and homes, were not built to withstand earthquakes. Numerous buildings collapsed, burying people under the debris. The term “tofu school” made the rounds.
Much has changed since then. Although earthquake tragedies have repeatedly occurred, the number of victims has tended to decrease since Wenchuan.
This earthquake is obviously also a huge tragedy for the people in Gansu. Chinese state media showed photos of people fleeing from their homes into the winter cold after the quake, wrapped in blankets and waiting outside. The freezing temperatures of up to minus 13 degrees Celsius were particularly hard on those in need of help as well as rescuers on Tuesday.
Eyewitnesses told the state news agency Xinhua that the earthquake in Jishishan had caused damage to roads and other infrastructure. Over 6000 houses in Jishishan were also damaged. Some homes were destroyed entirely. Several villages lost power and the water supply was interrupted.
“We are still in shock,” a man from Jishishan told the local news portal Jimu around two hours after the earthquake. He and his family had rushed down the stairs from their apartment on the 16th floor and then driven to safety by car.
Eyewitnesses said that the earthquake could also be felt in Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu. On social media, users shared videos of students in Lanzhou rushing out of their rooms during the night to get to safety. The next few days will show whether the worst is over or the number of victims will continue to rise.
Sinolytics is a European research-based consultancy entirely focused on China. It advises European companies on their strategic orientation and specific business activities in the People’s Republic.
His German is a bit rusty, Cobus van Staden replies to the question whether he speaks Japanese. “When I try to speak German, I always end up speaking Japanese.” So he hopes that the people he talks to will somehow magically understand Japanese. And his Chinese? He has learned the language, but doesn’t speak it particularly well. Van Staden’s last visit to China was several years ago; he has not returned since the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, the South African had traveled to China several times.
Van Staden’s interest in the People’s Republic was sparked while working on his PhD in philosophy and media studies at Nagoya University in Japan from 2001 to 2008. In Nagoya’s international community, he had more and more contact with people from China. Before his stay in Japan, van Staden had studied media studies and worked as a producer of documentary films.
But then Asia and Africa became van Staden’s primary focus. As a postdoc at the South African University of Stellenbosch and at the Sarchi Chair of African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the University of Johannesburg, he worked on a comparison of Chinese and Japanese public diplomacy in Africa. In 2013, he moved to the Department of Media Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, where he still teaches.
His academic research has focused on media coverage of China and Japan’s relations with Africa and the use of media as a public diplomacy tool in the Global South. He is also a Research Affiliate at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).
In 2010, Cobus van Staden and journalist Eric Olander founded the China Global South Project, which considers itself an “independent multimedia organization” providing information about China’s activities in the Global South, particularly in African countries. Until August 2019, it was a passion project for both of them, which they worked on after work and at weekends, as the website states. Today, they have a full-time team of editors and analysts in five countries in Africa and Asia who produce news and analysis every day. Van Staden is now officially Managing Editor.
The China Global South Project reports on China’s global activities in the form of podcasts and newsletters and strives to report as impartially as possible. It is financed by subscriptions. “Chinese media report everything positively, while Western media portray the whole thing as a huge conspiracy,” says van Staden. His project, on the other hand, aims to provide the most concrete, nuanced and evidence-based reporting possible on relations between China and the global South. The audience is a small niche consisting of diplomats, academics and students worldwide.
“I have seen that Western narratives about China and Africa are not really based on true analysis,” says van Staden. For example, it is often reported that China deliberately burdens economically weak countries with debt to gain leverage. “Leading researchers have refuted these allegations,” he says. Instead, Africa’s debt is owed to European private lenders, with higher interest rates than Chinese government loans. “China is being instrumentalized in this discourse.”
However, this does not mean there are no problems with the Chinese government. The problem is simply that the real issues are not being brought into focus because the media focus too much on the same old narratives. Van Staden’s motivation for his project is to set such narratives straight so that the world can once again deal with the real difficulties affecting African countries. Shoko Bethke
Food for the rebound: This is what is expected of these mainland visitors taking a stroll down Hong Kong’s Temple Street. The food stalls that are temporarily set up here are part of the so-called Evening Economy – promoted by the government in the hope of boosting the post-pandemic economy and increasing tourism revenue.
