With Hong Kong's sky-high cost of living, residents like Andy Tsui have been looking for alternative ways to have more fun and spend less. And he's found one.
Recent weekends have seen him shopping at glitzy malls, singing at swanky karaoke joints and dining on the freshest Australian crayfish.
Add a cup of the trendiest bubble tea, and his bill for the day normally amounts to no more than $60. That's the sort of money many of his friends have been paying for just one meal — and no boba.
His secret? Rather than spending his cash in his hometown of Hong Kong, he's been crossing the border into mainland China to splurge instead.
"You can have half a Peking duck for as little as 60 to 70 yuan ($10), more than enough to feed three people, and on every corner there is a bubble tea place that sells a cup that costs just 10 to 12 yuan ($1.70)," Tsui told CNN, ahead of yet another weekend trip to Shenzhen. "The price difference is just so stark."
During the visits, he often finds himself surrounded by "more Hongkongers than locals."
Tsui is one of the hundreds of thousands of Hongkongers who have been routinely making the short trip to the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen on weekends for food, shopping and entertainment.
Most are taking advantage of the high-speed rail service between the cities that opened in 2018, which has cut the travel time to less than half an hour.
In the minds of the day trippers, these cross-border jaunts are just fun days out. But collectively, they are part of a bigger picture that reveals much about the shifting power dynamics between China and Hong Kong, and East and West.
Such trips are noteworthy because, for much of Hong Kong's modern history, the traffic has been largely — conspicuously, even — in the other direction.
In the decades after the 1949 establishment of the People's Republic of China, when the mainland was mired in poverty, hundreds of thousands of Chinese are estimated to have risked their lives to reach the glittering shores of what was then a British colony.
They were drawn not only by the promise of Western-style freedoms, but by the sort of luxuries that only Western-style capitalism was able to afford at the time.
Hong Kong's draw endured long after Britain handed over control of the city to China's communist masters in 1997. Under the "One Country, Two Systems" formula of governance, Beijing allowed the city to keep its capitalist ways and Western-style freedoms, mindful of upsetting an economy that was then equivalent to almost 20% of China's.
Even as recently as 2018, 51 million mainland Chinese tourists — about seven times the population of Hong Kong — visited the city, flocking to the local Disneyland or filling up suitcases stuffed with foreign goods such as baby formula to cart back across the border.
Indeed, so numerous were the arrivals that, despite the boost to the economy, locals began to resent their guests. Newspapers ran reports about misbehaving mainlanders and street protests denounced them as "locusts."
The backlash got so bad that the Hong Kong government was eventually forced to limit Shenzhen residents to once-a-week visits.
But fast forward a few years, and the picture has changed. In 2023, just 26 million mainlanders — about half of the 2018 crowd — visited Hong Kong.
More tellingly, only about 200,000 mainland Chinese now visit the city on weekends, while more than twice that number travel in the opposite direction to Shenzhen, according to data from the Hong Kong Immigration Department tracking the second half of 2023.
Keep reading about what's drawing Hong Kongers across the border.
More on changes within the former British colony:
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