Public Eye | Tick tock! Mainland tourist time bomb is set to blast

Public Eye is not gloating … but we told you so. We warned the glut of mainland tourists to our tiny city was a ticking time bomb. But policymakers turned a deaf ear, until the Lunar New Year, when shameful images of mainlanders being forced by crooked travel agencies to sleep in seedy guesthouses, and even in a tourist bus, drew global attention. Now th ey are all scrambling to admit things have got out of hand. It's time to admit the disadvantages now outweigh the advantages of giving easy entry to millions of mainlanders. The tensions we saw when half a million mainlanders flooded the city during the Lunar New Year was just a warning of a coming explosion. We can expect mainland visitors to swell to 50 million a year in two years' time. Even France - the world's top tourist destination - only has about 70 million annually. No other city has 1.3 billion people at its doorstep, with 300 million in southern China eligible for easy entry and within an hour's reach of Hong Kong. Officials insist it is impossible to reverse the multiple entry visas for mainlanders, but other cities limit visitor numbers by choosing the people they allow in. Our immigration officers blindly allow in mainlanders who come several times a day for questionable reasons, yet closely scrutinise those from places such as the Philippines. We need to wake up and smell the time bomb.

Security chief Lai Tung-kwok is unworried about the time bomb. He said we have had no "unpleasant incidents", despite the swelling number of mainland visitors. He has obviously forgotten about the ugly confrontations over mainlanders eating on the MTR, parallel-goods traders in Sheung Shui, and outside the Tsim Sha Tsui Dolce & Gabbana store. Our overpaid bureaucrats prefer to wait until after "unpleasant incidents" happen before they act. That's why we always say they need to beam back to earth from La la land.