Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 83

Part II

People:Whose Indigenity?

84 Whose Tradition?

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 85

Chapter 4

Revamping Tradition:
Contested Politics of‘The Indigenous’ inPostcolonial Hong Kong
Shu-Mei Huang[Yet] it was unthinkable that anyone not of the village clan could build a house ina village.

Denis Bray (2001, p. 164)

Using the past, present, and future to emphasize each other is common incommemorations.
John Carroll (2005, p. 165)

On lunar New Year’s Eve, 2012, the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk(HYK), Wong-fat Lau, made a drawing in the Che Kung Temple in thepresence of many of the elite in the New Territories (NT) – a symbolicgesture to welcome the New Year in Hong Kong. The poem in the drawing
read, ‘What is evil and what is divine? It’s so hard to differentiate the evil
from the divine’. Chairman Lau was subsequently bombarded by questions
from the media about whether the poem alluded to the then-serious
competition for Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region (HKSAR). Lau laughed, without giving any explicit message.
About 2 years earlier, during mid-October 2010, I had happened toattend a community meeting in the soon-to-be-demolished village of
Choi Yuen. Some sixty people had gathered to witness a significant phone
call to Lau, in which the villagers were trying to obtain his assistance innegotiating a right-of-way to enable their relocation plan. ‘Did Lau own theland?’ I asked. ‘No’, I was told. ‘But he is the king of the NT!’86 Whose Tradition?

The mystic power represented by Lau raises several questions. What
are the longstanding traditions in the NT that make politics – and thepolitics of land, in particular – so different than in urban Hong Kong?
And, specifically, how has the privilege of the indigenous been translated
into a ‘small-house policy’ (SHP) that continues to produce low-density
development in the rapidly urbanizing landscape of the New Territories?
In addressing these questions, this chapter will explore how the notionof ‘tradition’ is complicit in establishing the special privileges of the ‘theindigenous’ in Hong Kong.
The SHP, and the indigenous communities which qualify for it, havebeen much criticized in recent years. Indeed, abuse of the small-housepolicy is not unheard of. Yet no criminal case related to it had ever beenbrought before a court until a recent housing scam in which elevenindigenous villagers and a developer were to be jailed for defrauding theauthorities. Not surprisingly, the HYK opposed the sentence, pointing
out that the policy of allowing each male indigenous villager to build athree-storey villa was a traditional right protected by the Basic Law – Hong
Kong’s mini-constitution (SCMP, 2015).
To understand the idea and practice of traditional rights in postcolonial
Hong Kong it is first necessary to appreciate the dualism at work inaccounting for Hong Kong’s territorial origins. On the one hand, official
history stresses the political and cultural break that took place with theformation of the British colony (Carroll, 2005, pp.164–167). On the other,strategic recognition of precolonial tradition has been reinforced in many
matters in the NT. This binary is embodied in the landscape, where walledvillages (poon choi – also the term used for a Cantonese dish served in big
bowls) and three-storey ‘village houses’ have been closely associated withthe lives of those descended from the NT’s original inhabitants (figure4.1). Indeed, though less celebrated than other aspects of the global city,
the power of the indigenous has become a key feature of land and identity
politics in Hong Kong – especially since, in recent years, the NT became
the frontier of economic integration with mainland Shenzhen.
Among other rights, since 1972, indigenous males have been allowed
to build small houses, in the name of tradition. This privilege distinguishes
them from other residents, especially those descended from migrants
who arrived in the NT after the Chinese revolution in 1949. These
non-indigenous villagers, despite having contributed to the survival of
agriculture in Hong Kong, have mostly been considered landless farmers
without an ancestral settlement or officially recognized tradition. Their
settlements and leased farmlands have thus been vulnerable to takeover

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 87

Figure 4.1. Three-storey ‘village houses’ in the New Territories. (Photo: Shu-Mei Huang)as sites for development of new towns and infrastructure projects.
Meanwhile, the privileged indigenous, who dominate with respect to land
rights, have continued to expand their presence in the NT. The power
granted by ‘indigeneity’ and ‘tradition’ thus seems to reinforce the dualism
embedded within the rural landscape of Hong Kong.
By examining the origin and nature of this unequal condition, thischapter seeks to advance understanding of processes of agency andauthorship that frequently support notions of tradition. The interpretationand commercialization of tradition for power and profit, as the editors of
this volume suggest, has been a potent force in both the transformationand preservation of built environments. What is of particular interest here
is how tradition and the authors of tradition transform and constitute one
another, and how these processes may lend legitimacy to, and leverage
power from, indigenous claims to space and place. The chapter begins byintroducing the colonial gaze that produced the indigenous inhabitants ofHong Kong.

Building for and of the Great Difference
It was only in 1972, on the occasion of the institutionalization of the SHP,
that the term ‘indigenous inhabitants’ was officially adopted by the Hong
Kong Executive Council (Chan, 1996). Ethnically speaking, indigenous

88 Whose Tradition?

residents of Hong Kong are indeed Han Chinese, the majority in China.
Yet they have been differentiated from the non-indigenous population,
Han and otherwise, on the basis of a shared tradition defined at a specificmoment, that when the British colony was expanded to include the New
Territories. As Chan (1998) has noted, ‘Tradition is interpreted as thesharing of a place of origin and rural customs by the villagers, and [in HongKong] the year 1898 has assumed significance in the interpretation ofshared native place (xinangxa) by the inhabitants’. To be more precise, theindigenous community was differentiated along with the demarcation of
the New Territories, and their tradition was explicitly recognized in 1899
when the British forced Qing China to grant them a 99-year lease to thearea through ‘The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory’.
James Stewart Lockhart, the Cadet Officer of the Hong Kong Civil
Service at the time, called the distinction between native villagers andthe colonial population ‘the great difference’, to be respectfully managed(Hayes, 2006). And for more than a century this instance of the colonial
gaze has left its imprint on the way the NT have been governed. It persists
today despite the reality that contemporary development has massively
changed the area and diluted the original difference between its urban andrural populations. As a consequence, since 1980, many have challenged
the necessity of separating land policies in the NT from those in the restof Hong Kong (Hayes, 2006, p. 159). Yet the indigenous leadership has
managed to maintain their paramount power, even though, according to
the 2011 Census, indigenous inhabitants now comprise less than 10 per
cent of the population of the NT.
The New Territories today make up 86 per cent of Hong Kong’s landarea. When the area was initially taken over by the British Crown, it wasdemarcated into 355 survey districts according to the New Territories(Land Court) Ordinance of 1900 (the Ordinance 1900). This law also
stipulated premiums and certificates of land ownership and use between
1904 and 1905 that changed the prevailing system of tenure from freeholdto leasehold (Sit, 2011; Lau, 1999). The ordinance further discontinued thepractice of ‘bottom-soil right’, reshaping the relationship between tenant
farmers and landlords.1 Significantly, since that time, the use of land cannot
be changed without official permission. Moreover, the Ordinance 1900
allowed the government to expropriate properties in the interest of public
good (Sit, 2011, p. 58).
Considering this history, it may be fair to say that the establishment ofindigeneity in the former colony was itself a colonial product, renderedby what Renato Rosaldo (1989) has called ‘imperialist nostalgia’. As one

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 89

former district officer, Denis Bray (2001, p. 37), wrote in a memoir, ‘In the
1950s, the New Territories were terra incognita for urban dwellers – andthat included everyone of any seniority in the government’. Thus, despite
celebrating the centenary of its governance of Hong Kong in 1941, in theeyes of the British colonial administration the NT were still a place where
farmers grew rice and ‘… village life continued in very much the way thatit had done for generations’ (Bray, 2001, p. 37). According to Jones (1995,
p. 180), the lack of understanding of the NT by the British contributed
to the romantic goal of preserving village life. Interestingly, however, thisnostalgic reading of life did not extend to similar historical villages in New
Kowloon and on Hong Kong Island (figure 4.2).2 In effect, therefore, thecentury-old discourse surrounding tradition in the NT has emphasizedboth connections and disconnections: it has connected people of sharedorigin with their lands, while simultaneously disconnecting them fromtheir motherland and from the urbanized territory of the colony.
Indigenous communities have, in general, been characterized by theirconnection to the land, by traditions embedded in place, and by the ways
place-making involves multiple acts of remembering and imagining

Figure 4.2. The New Territories. (Source: Adapted from an old map available fromWiki Commons)90 Whose Tradition?

(Casey, 1987). If tradition is to continue, philosophers have argued, thefact that ‘… its transmission is carried in the ebbs and flow of everyday
life makes it indispensable that it be presented not in a description ortheory but instead instantiated as thus embedded’ (Marshall, 2005, p. 2).
Yet the kind of tradition referred to in the NT has been largely reduced
to a continuation of the right from one generation to the next to occupy
land with the approval of the government no matter what is built thereor what activities are practiced. Today, it is thus not a surprise to find nonindigenous inhabitants residing in rented small houses built on village lands
next to stacks of shipping containers. Arguably, when the state introduced
itself into the act of transmission – when tradition was first translated into
the colonial policy of small houses, and then written into the Basic Law
prior to the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 – tradition as anembedded process was essentially transformed into a commodifiable land
grant. It is thus important to historicize the commodity chain and reveal
the political agency hidden within it.
Nezar AlSayyad’s treatment of tradition as a regime is helpful here. He
has suggested that tradition is ‘deployed, resisted, and reworked throughhegemonic struggles that seek to create both built environments andcitizen-subjects’ (2004, p. 19). The colonial creation of the SHP exemplifies
this thesis, particularly as it related to the perpetuation of aspects of thecolonial landscape in postcolonial Hong Kong. Before elaborating further
on this relation, let me provide a brief history of the policy.
The most dedicated advocate of the small-house policy is the HYK.
Even though it was only given formal status by the Heung Yee Kuk
Ordinance (Chapter 1097) in 1959 (Lee, 1984, pp. 166–167), it has been themost important political organization in the NT since the 1920s. The HYK
initially rose to importance as a result of a political crisis, when the colonial
government promulgated the ‘crown lands resumption ordinance’ in
1922, and followed it with a plan to regulate the conversion of farmland tobuilding sites (Sit, 2011, p. 191). Numerous protests organized by the HYK
eventually forced the government to exempt the indigenous villagers frompaying a differential premium when they built houses for their own use.
And since then, the HYK has served as an important consultation group.
As mentioned above, its status was formalized after World War II, at a time
when an elective system of village representatives and rural committees
was also created to establish a local political system. Yet, especially in lightof the rapid demographic change in the New Territories from the 1950s
to the 1970s, this patrilineal system was never meant to cover the whole
population of the area (Bray, 2001, p. 97).

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 91

The SHP emerged in November 1972 from a two-decade-longnegotiation of rights between villagers and the colonial government.
Following the war, the Building Ordinance of 1950 required villagers
to submit their plans for approval before constructing houses. And asubsequent policy change in 1955 required owners of concrete houses
to pay an extra premium. Furthermore, anyone who planned to build a
new such house had to convert their leasehold to a site from farmland toresidential land at a value ratio of 3 to 1. From 1959 to 1971, numerous
debates emerged over deregulation and premium exemption with regard tosuch issues as materials, area, and building height.
The constant changes upset the indigenous population, and theresentment grew into an unprecedented village uprising between 1971
and 1972. With 1,000 signatures collected from village representatives, the
HYK called a rally against the increasing regulation of housing constructionin the existing villages.3 The government gave in, and within six weeks it
passed the ‘Building Ordinance [New Territory], 1972’, which gave birth
to the SHP. The SHP allowed any certified indigenous male (of at least
eighteen years of age, descended through the male lineage from a maleresident of an officially recognized indigenous village in 1898 or earlier)to build one small house in his lifetime in the rural development zone orin an extension area. Moreover, as long as owners complied with certain
criteria, they were exempted from submitting formal building plans to thegovernment.
At the time, the government also provided a list of 642 indigenous
villages recognized as having existed prior to 1898. Small houses could
be built on private land, or they could be built on government land at aconcessionary premium – but only within the Village Environs (VE)(typically defined as an area 300 feet [91 metres] from the outermost
corner of the outermost house built before December 1972), or within the
VEA (Village Extension Area). The SHP was therefore intended to codify
the allegedly traditional practice whereby the family head could build for
himself and for each of his sons upon marriage a house within the village
area, either on his own land or on village building lots acquired throughauction among certified residents of a particular village.
Why is the footprint of a small house set today at 700 square feet (65square metres)? In fact, the measurement of small houses has changed
over time – as if tradition could be sized and negotiated. The preliminary
sizing dates to 1905, when the British decided, based on their observations,that a traditional village house would be defined as occupying 436 square
feet (40.5 square metres and one-hundredth of an acre, also known as one

92 Whose Tradition?

‘traditional division’ of land). This was important because buildings were
taxed based on such units.
The contemporary area of 700 square feet is halfway between 436
square feet (one ‘traditional division’) and 872 square feet (two ‘traditional
divisions’), rounded to the nearest hundred feet. Some have additionallysuggested that 700 square feet is simply the maximum building footprint
the government felt comfortable permitting. An important reference here
were publicly funded houses built to accommodate residents of traditional
villages displaced by government projects. The first prototype was an
approximately 700 square foot, gabled, two-storey structure built for the
residents of Kwan Mun Hau village. Later, such houses were built to
two-and-a-half storeys, including the cockloft, or three storeys with a flat
roof (Hopkinson and Lei, 2003, p. 8). Indeed, over the years the buildingheight restriction has gradually been increased from two, to two and ahalf, and finally three storeys (not to exceed 25 feet [7.6 metres]) by 1975.
Furthermore, flat roofs gradually came to dominate new buildings, since
the wooden beams required for pitched roofs became less available (figure
4.3).
It is worth noting here that the term ‘small house’ was only instituted
as a replacement for ‘village-type house’ on the advice of Denis Bray,
when he served as district officer (Bray, 2001, p. 164). This new, pragmatic
definition eliminated guidelines that had previously addressed traditional

Figure 4.3. The prototype of village houses. (Diagram: Shu-Mei Huang, 2014)

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 93

styles, replacing them with a simple dimensional standard. A juxtapositionof the official English name for the structure, however, with the colloquial
Cantonese term, ting uk (literally, ‘the male’s house’) is also revealing.
While colonial policy-makers focused on the SHP as a convenient way
to control village sprawl, indigenous residents focused on the exclusive
nature of the grant as a male right. The different wordings thus reflect the
ambiguousness of tradition. As Bray, the architect of the SHP, noted in
retrospect (2001, p. 166): ‘I knew perfectly well that it would not be long
before some enterprising architect would design pleasant little buildingsthat fitted the rules but looked nothing like a traditional village house. Sureenough, a Spanish-style house began to appear with lovely tiled half roofs’.
Bray also wrote that the policy was never meant to be permanent: ‘I do
not see these measures as anything more than interim measures which willcomplement the major job of producing a comprehensive development
plan for the rural New Territories’ (2001, p. 166). Nevertheless, theindigenous villagers saw the policy differently; for them the land grant was
ting, a ‘right’.
Today, small houses appear as no small privilege among Hong Kongers,
most of whom live in cramped conditions (Lai and Ho, 2001). ‘By definition
it is wrong’, the property-management expert Roger Nissim (2012, p. 130)
has noted. Compared to the traditional 436 square foot, two-storey Old
Schedule house prevailing in the NT in 1898, small houses today are far
from small (Nissim, 2012). Indeed, they are quite spacious compared to
the limited area available to the non-indigenous population, who live in
informal cottages, or to those NT residents who have been relocated to
public housing. The exclusive nature of the policy and the conduct of thequalification process also leave considerable room for abuse. To certify agrant applicant’s indigenous status, a small-house applicant must submit adeclaration, signed either by the representative of the applicant’s village orby a chairman (or vice-chairman) of the relevant rural committee. It is often
difficult for outsiders to verify these claims, and cases of corruption havebeen reported. In retrospect, then, it is possible to see how the exclusive
grant has been naturalized out of what originated as short-term thinking
about how to meet the indigenous population’s housing demand.
Gender also matters. When the colonial government passed the original
ordinance related to land ownership in the New Territories in 1902, it
allowed only males to inherit property. James Stewart Lockhart, whodelineated the boundaries of the NT, suggested that the most efficient andcheapest way to deal with land matters was to follow the then existing maleoriented inheritance system. Though the ordinance was soon abandoned,94 Whose Tradition?

in 1903, the article that stipulated ‘the tradition’ was continued in the
New Territories Ordinance, 1910 (article 13), and it remained in effectuntil the 1990s.4 As mentioned earlier, it was only in 1972, following theinstitutionalization of the SHP, that the term ‘indigenous inhabitants’ wasofficially adopted (Chan, 1996). However, it was also at this time that theHong Kong government started to expand its public housing programme
and the building of urban infrastructure in the NT to ease congestion inother areas of the colony (Nissim, 2012, p. 127). These parallel policies
eventually led to the coexistence in the NT of two contrasting housing
forms: small houses and high-rise public housing blocks.
Today, the disappearing distinction between the urban and the ruralin the NT, as mentioned earlier, has destabilized the discourse of ‘great
difference’ that once provided a basis for the grant of special housing
status to indigenous inhabitants. In fact many indigenous inhabitants
who enjoy ‘traditional rights’ do not even reside in the NT. According
to Dell Upton (2001, p. 299), manufactured traditions are not inherently
pernicious. Nevertheless, the use of manufactured traditions and theirconsequences are worthy of concern. What is of particular interest here
is how the use of tradition has led to a deterioration in the relationshipbetween the indigenous community of the NT and its neighbours andfellow citizens. The increasing sense of disconnection is two-fold: onthe one hand, the indigenous have disconnected themselves from theirneighbours in both geographical and political terms; on the other, they
have largely disconnected themselves from the place itself through thecommodification of the small houses the law has allowed them to build.
Arguably, the SHP may be considered compensatory in nature – aprivilege rather than a right, granted in response to the villagers’ demandfor housing (Lai, 2000). As of the end of 2011, according to statistics
provided by the Secretary for Development, since it was instituted in 1972,
a total of 36,912 small-house applications had been approved by the Lands
Department. By the end of 2011 the additional number of applications
being processed and waiting to be processed stood at 6,895 and 3,360,
respectively. Each application requires land, and as of 2012, the Planning
Department noted that about 3,147 hectares had been set aside as Village
Zone for the continuing construction of small houses (Lei, 2013). Yet theland available for small house development cannot be open-ended, and thismeans the policy is inherently unsustainable.
Meanwhile, the resale of small houses has also been a subject ofcontroversy. In January 1978, the then secretary for the NT, Sir David
Akers-Jones, almost cancelled the SHP over this issue. After negotiation,

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 95

however, resale was formally permitted in August 1978. The rules today
stipulate that, upon resale, an owner must pay a differential premium if
the house was built on public land. However, if a house is built on private
land, the owner must only pay such a differential if the transaction occurs
within 5 years of initial construction. Resale is further not limited to othermembers of the indigenous population.5
Such stipulations represented the beginning of a formal
commodification of traditional rights. A small house can today be divided
into three, one-storey units (of three bedrooms each) and sold to threebuyers at HK$2.5 to HK$4.5 million (US$322,600 to US$709,200) each.
According to an audit conducted in October 2002, nearly all such flats
were sold within about five months of the removal of the restriction onalienation (Hopkinson and Lao 2003). In the name of indigenous villagers,
some developers are also building and selling luxury houses on SHP land,
providing a share of the proceeds to the villagers. According to one source
I interviewed in November 2015, ‘There are middle-class professionals
who purposely seek tranquillity by living in small houses to disconnect
themselves from the urban chaos’.
Additionally, the issue of resale surfaced at a time when at least 80 per
cent of indigenous male villagers had migrated abroad to work – a fact inseeming conflict with the claim of increased indigenous-village housing
demand. Indeed, the indigenous population in 1987 was about 460,000,
of whom 260,000 (more than a half) resided overseas (Committee on the
Right, Wellbeing…, 1987). Nevertheless, the HYK has now ensured that
the SHP and other rights be extended to indigenous males overseas. This,
however, created an invitation for developers to abuse the SHP. Indeed,some have even sent scouts to the UK to look for indigenous villagers withentitlements. Thus, instead of responding to real housing need, the SHP
is primarily valuable today because it creates a profitable commodity suchas those structures built by developers and shown in the accompanying in
figures 4.4 and 4.5.
Figures 4.4 and 4.5
In the late 1980s, when it came to drafting the Sino-British Joint
Declaration and the Basic Law in the lead-up to the 1998 handover ofHong Kong to China, it also became clear that, in the name of tradition,
the indigenous elite was determined to maintain the two systems of land
rights in the NT (Committee on the Right, Wellbeing…, 1987). In thisregard, indigenous representatives refused to consider the SHP a privilege;

96 Whose Tradition?

Figure 4.4. The developers built small houses as collective housing by soliciting ‘tingrights’ from the indigenous inhabitants. (Photo: Shu-Mei Huang, 2014)

Figure 4.5. Village houses built as gated communities by private developers. (Photo:
Shu-Mei Huang, 2015)

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 97

it was rather framed as a form of compensation that could hardly make up
for the historical loss they incurred when their freehold rights had beentransmuted to leasehold following the annexation of the NT to Hong Kong.
In the end, Article 40 of the Basic Law recognized that ‘The lawful traditionalrights and interests of the indigenous inhabitants of the “New Territories”
shall be protected by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’(emphasis added). Moreover, out of respect for ‘traditional rights’, all leases
that were to expire on 30 June 1997 were extended until 30 June 2047, withthe exception of the new annual rent applicable to other land leaseholders.
It is further worth noting here that the wording of an older draft of thearticle had referred to ‘the legitimate traditional rights and interests…’, but
the word ‘legitimate’ was ultimately replaced with ‘lawful’ (Hopkinson andLei, 2003). The subtle change avoided the need to address the debatable
legitimacy of legislating a privilege. Tradition may now thus be taken for
granted, since no clear definition of ‘traditional rights and interests’ appears
in the document. Furthermore, the continued traditional character of thegiven society where the law is embedded is left unquestioned.
Over the years male indigenous leaders in the NT have lobbied
government officials to protect their ‘rights’. But there has been no shortageof criticism of the exclusion of indigenous women from the benefits of
the SHP and related inheritance laws. A movement during the late 1980s
and early 1990s advocating for female inheritance in Hong Kong reached
its peak in 1994, when a report by the Hong Kong Council of Women
pointed to the patrilineal practice as a form of gender discrimination that
contravened the colony’s newly passed Bill of Rights. In 1995, echoing
the movement, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social andCultural Rights also made its concern with the policy official. This was met
by a campaign by the HYK, ‘Why are you killing our culture?’ (Merry andStern, 2005). Eventually, however, the movement did lead to a successful
amendment to the New Territories Land (Exemption) Ordinance allowing
women to inherit property. Significantly, however, this also left the SHP
intact.

Tradition is (Dis)connection
As Selina Chan has pointed out, the ethnicity of the indigenous inhabitantsof the NT villages represents a clear case of the politicization of identity.
At the outset this identity was constructed in a way that homogenized thediverse ethnicities living in the area, including at least Punti and Hakka,
before 1898 (Chan, 1998). However, the lineage organization of the

98 Whose Tradition?

villages, which so intrigued anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s, now
consists mainly of ‘virtual kinship’ (Watson, 2004). Nevertheless, it is bythese means that an exclusive distribution system operates. And it is bymeans of this system that tradition has been produced and consumed in
the NT.
Tradition, as Ananya Roy (2004, p. 64) has noted, ‘only becomes
authentic in the act of consumption’, and ‘the consumption of tradition is
the production of tradition’. Simultaneous consumption and production
may be partially the case with regard to the construction of small houses.
But the fact that each small house also requires a piece of land makes
the act of its construction more than merely performative. For instance,
the lack of comprehensive planning has encouraged village sprawl andcreated environmental impacts in such areas as drainage, water quality,
and transportation. The exercise of traditional ‘rights’ has, ironically, also
resulted in the loss of old village houses as indigenous heritage.
The granting of such rights obviously represents an inefficient andunsustainable use of a scarce resource, in which the greater society of Hong
Kong should have a say. The continuous growth of small houses cannot be
contained; they establish claims that simultaneously produce and consume
territory. Thus, while others may lament that tradition is ending, thepower of tradition in this case seems very much to have progressed in new
directions, ones that arguably enable continuing processes of exclusion anddispossession. As AlSayyad (2004, p. 23) has argued, ‘so it would seem thatwhat has ended, in the end, is not tradition itself, but the idea of tradition asa harbinger of authenticity, and as a container of specific cultural meaning’.
By transforming itself into a distribution system that serves the selfdisplaced indigenous, tradition has thus displaced the issue of ‘authenticity’altogether in the NT.
With reference to the spread of Western cultural dominance, Jane M.
Jacobs (2004, p. 31) has pointed to ‘the embedded teleology and geographyof the modern making of tradition’. Moreover, to describe their twinned
etiology, she described tradition and modernity as ‘a vibrating couplet within
which the terms are both co-dependent and mutually exclusive’ (Jacobs,
2004, p. 33). Thus, in understanding processes of deterritorialization andreterritorialization under globalization, she argued for a formulation ofrelationship whereby ‘tradition is (not) modern’.
Of related concern here are the processes of disconnection andreconnection that may appear in the name of tradition when traditionis extended to a new cultural regime. Jacobs appreciated the inevitable
inventiveness of continuations of tradition, and, in particular, of attempts

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 99

to amplify indigenous authority through productive processes enabled byhybrid architecture. The indigenous authority in Hong Kong, however,has not sought to connect different actors in the extension of tradition.
Rather, it has acted more as if engaged in a bidding game, where theindigenous inhabitants have now disconnected themselves from their place
and tradition. Literally speaking, they are not necessarily there. However,the fact that an increasing share of the consumption and production of
tradition is now carried out in the absence of the indigenous villagers raises
questions about the fundamental meaning of being indigenous and of
the authority of the indigenous when its authors are no longer in place.
To paraphrase Jacobs’s productively unstable formula, it may be fair to saythat tradition can sometimes be considered a (dis)connection. And in thiscase, the sense of disconnection is completely materialized in the emerging
gated communities being created through the construction of new small
houses (see figure 4.5).
It was within this context that the indigenous population originallysought to lobby Chinese authorities to continue the two land-tenuresystems developed during colonial times into post-handover Hong Kong
(Chan, 1998, pp. 39–54). And they attempted to find justification, by
association, in the differential treatment granted to Hong Kong under the
principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ by which the territory was to bereincorporated with the mainland (Chan, 1998, pp. 39–54). In other words,
they sought to formalize the special system of indigenous rights througha condition of ‘Two systems in One Hong Kong’ (Lau, 1999, p. 119).
However, beneath the discourse of tradition, ‘the great difference’ in the
NT has been translated into a particular kind of social order, land politics,
and built form. And the HYK was not totally unaware of the problems
created by this system. They therefore encouraged proposals for alternative
ways to sustain tradition – for example, by a doubling or tripling of thevolume of small houses (in six- to ten-storey blocks) to address the issue of
an insufficient supply of land (Ng, 2000).
At the same time as the indigenous population has sought to extend
its rights, interest has also been revived in farming in the now rapidly
urbanizing NT. This movement has been led by non-indigenous farmers,
who have organized protests to keep the territories green, agrarian,and unbuilt. Ironically, this group would never have been considered alegitimate claimant under the colonial gaze.
The postcolonial thinker Ashis Nandy has provided some thoughtsthat may be relevant here. Nandy (1983, p. ix) has argued that ‘Moderncolonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and100 Whose Tradition?

technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies
incompatible with the traditional order’. Seemingly, it is precisely inthis sense that the invention of the small-house policy created a politicalhierarchy that served the interest of colonial governance. The colonial
regime did not deny, but rather it transformed the traditional order. And
this has resulted in a unique form of urbanization in the NT in which
tradition is simultaneously disabled and augmented. While ordinary
indigenous people were thus encouraged to leave their farmland behind,the indigenous elite gained a new form of power and authority in apolitical system certified by the British, who ironically came to function
as the upholders of Chinese tradition. By accepting indigenous status,
as governable imperial subjects, one gained the ‘privilege’ to have one’s
agricultural lands expropriated in exchange for a small house. Yet thishas now led to a loss of the very unbuilt territory where the tradition was
originally grounded.
This interpretation of historical events raises several importantquestions. Is it possible that tradition might once again serve as aconnecting device, rather than one that displaces people from lands, andthat disconnects people from other people? And, is there an alternative tothe gradual ‘ungrounding’ of tradition?
For his part, Nandy (2014, p. 12) has called for recognition of thecreativity of everyday life and the possibilities opened by ‘the partly
mnemonic traditions of healing and agronomy’. That tradition is translated
into a tradable property right has gradually led to a loss of the land where
the mnemonic traditions were embedded. In the following section I
will describe actions by the non-indigenous population of the NT that
demonstrate their determination to sustain the mnemonic traditions
embedded there.

Non-indigenous Communities
Acting for and against ‘Tradition’Some of the aforementioned gated communities that have been developedwith small-house grants are located in the proximity of the Kam Sheung
Road station. The same area contains many non-indigenous villages
originally formed in the 1950 and 1960s, when many mainlanders fled to
Hong Kong from southern China to avoid political turmoil and famine.
Their arrival coincided with the colonial government’s policy to promotelocal agriculture to reduce Hong Kong’s dependence on China for its
food supply. Many migrants took on the important role of being farmers,

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 101

Figure 4.6. Typical one- or two-story houses in non-indigenous villages. (Photo: ShuMei Huang, 2014)

cultivating lands leased to them by the indigenous villagers. Yet, because
they were considered ‘non-indigenous inhabitants’, they were excluded
from local politics, which were dominated by the HYK. Next to theirgardens, they mostly lived in self-built farmhouses, which have been
categorized under the law as ‘temporary structures’ if they were built before
1980 (figure 4.6).
Following the initial period of growing agricultural production,
however, a decline closely followed the relaxing of control over agricultural
imports from China starting in the late 1980s. One consequence, forexample, is there has been no production of rice since 1990. Hong Kong’s
self-sufficiency in vegetables, which stood at 13.9 per cent in 1997, had also
fallen to only 2.3 per cent by 2012 (Local Research Community, 2013).
Overall, agriculture now accounts for less than 0.5 per cent of GDP in
Hong Kong. Likewise, in the past decade, 30 per cent of farmland has beentransformed into other uses. Currently, there are only 4,575 hectares offarmland remaining in Hong Kong, and about 80 per cent of agriculturalland is idle (most of it having been bought up by developers).
In a territory where farming has become a marginal activity, the case of
Choy Yuen village (among others) illustrates the birth of a new awarenessof how farming may connect tradition to a more sustainable way of life.
The name Choy Yuen literally means ‘vegetable garden’. A typical non-102 Whose Tradition?

indigenous village formed in the 1950s, it comprised roughly 500 people in2009. During the 1970s and 1980s, vegetable- and flower-growing were thepredominant activities there. This was exemplified by the ‘veggie station’at its entrance – one of two government-run stations associated with the
Vegetable Market Organization, through which villagers could sell theirproduce through a public entity.
In the mid-2000s, plans were announced to demolish the village toallow construction of the controversial Guangzhou-Hong Kong Express
Rail Link (hereafter XRL). Once this plan was announced, many questions
arose. For example, why was it necessary to demolish this village inparticular? And why was it even necessary to carry out such a plan, which
would cost US$9 billion? From 2008 onwards, however, the village’s
resistance to displacement evolved into a general anti-high-speed-rail
movement, and between 2009 and 2011 thousands of people took to thestreets to urge the HKSAR to adequately rehouse village inhabitants andallow them to continue farming and living in an integrated landscape.
Some in mainstream Hong Kong society have questioned why thevillage opted to fight for collective relocation instead of accepting an
immediate monetary compensation or rehousing in public estates. It waslargely forgotten that there had been previous instances of entire villages
being relocated in both the 1960s and 1980s. In both the case of Tsuen Wan
and Ha Kwai Chung, two indigenous villages, the colonial government hadforcedly expropriated village lands and built new housing for the villagers at
public expense. Interestingly, in the Ha Kwai Chung case, the government
had built new two-storey houses with 675 square foot (62.7 square metre)footprints. The size and form of these new houses implicitly recognized
the example of the SHP (Yiu, 2015).
The Choy Yuen village mobilization was augmented by the emerging
social activism of the so-called post-80 and post-90 Hong Kongers, whose
numerous rallies pressured the Legislative Council to temporarily holdback funding for the XRL. Throughout 2009 and into early 2010, several
reports were also published by civic groups questioning planning for the
project, including overly optimistic claims of transportation speed, poor
analysis of cost-benefit return, inflated ridership estimates, and inadequate
concern for immigration control. Despite growing opposition, funding
was eventually approved, however, and Choy Yuen village was dismantled
in 2012. The notable level of social discontent did force the government topartially accommodate the villagers’ appeal for collective relocation.
With the help of social workers and student volunteers, the villagers
organized themselves to purchase a parcel of land where they could build

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 103

houses together as a cooperative. However, this seemingly simple effort atcollective relocation proved much more challenging than expected. Major
difficulties arose when it came to obtaining building permits, land, rightsof-way, and access to water and utilities. For example, the government did
not provide the assistance it would have in the case of the relocation of
an indigenous village. And the villagers not were granted permits throughthe SHP. Instead, they could only apply, through the less generous Land
Rehabilitation Scheme, to build two-storey structures with footprint of
400 square feet (37 square metres) next to their farmlands.6
Farmland, obviously the key to the relocation plan, was also not easy
to obtain. After more than sixty failed attempts the village still had notbeen able to acquire a suitable site. Across the NT, available land often
suffered from serious pollution and soil degradation due to the practice of‘destroy first, build later’ – for example, by dumping construction waste
on abandoned farmland or in fish ponds to preclude future efforts to farmthem.
Another problem, hinted at earlier, is the requirement that villagers
secure the consent of local indigenous leaders to buy or develop properties.
This is why, as I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the Choy Yuen
villagers had to phone the then HYK chairman Wong-fat Lau. At the endof 2010 the villagers had finally been able to obtain a suitable site fromone landlord and an agreement for a right-of-way to it from another. But
their excitement was soon dashed when the price for the right-of-way was
subsequently raised from an initial US$25,800, to US$387,000, and then
US$645,000 – that is, twenty-five times the original offer. Faced with thissituation, the villagers had no other alternative than to appeal to Lau, whothen surprisingly announced that an anonymous donor had agreed to settle
the deal for them. The entire drama seemed to have been created for the
express purpose of reaffirming the power of the indigenous leadership.7‘There are no ancestral halls or temples in the non-indigenous villages’,
noted Y.C. Chen, one of the village activists, in a 15 June 2011, interview.
‘But the belief in farming as an integrated way of living serves as our
temple to anchor the new village.’ Indeed, some third-generation villagers
I interviewed in May 2011 told me they considered their village to be heungha, a Cantonese term used by early mainlander migrants literally to mean‘hometown’. To assert their way of life next to their farms was to someextent a search for an alternative tradition that might empower the nonindigenous population.
In effect, the lack of a longstanding patrilineal leadership structure
within the indigenous community had left a space for families with

104 Whose Tradition?

different backgrounds and interests to negotiate, cooperate, and even fight
one another for access to resources. As P.F. Chen, one of the organizers ofthe village relocation effort pointed out, the social network in the village has
been largely developed based on their lived experiences over five decades.
This has, among other things, involved battling floods, building houses,
and selling vegetables together (Yu, 2013, p. 95). And with the help ofactivists and planners, these villagers had ultimately managed to reconcile
their diverse opinions in the relocation struggle through an exhaustive
participatory planning and building process (Wang, 2014). The result wasa project for a new village comprising forty-seven low-cost ‘eco-village
houses’, along with a sustainable plan for fish ponds, orchards, a rainwater
garden, and wastewater recycling.
Interestingly, farming as a way of life has also gradually attracted theinterest of young activists from outside the village community. Several ofthem even launched a project entitled ‘Choy Yuen Life’, and moved intoa vacant village house to continue working with the villagers from 2010
to 2012. Gradually, the project evolved into a combination of community
organizing, organic farming, and experimental art. In a way, these young
people became part of the village, and in so doing expanded, if not
redefined, the villagers’ traditional way of life. As one of the young activistfarmers told me in a 22 May 2011, interview: ‘Initially it was indeed a way
to establish trust among the activists and the villagers. But it has beenchanging. Now I see us doing this more for our own interest in farming
and living together than serving the social movement’. Another implicationof this transformative process, however, is that it has implicitly extendedof the notion of tradition and the boundary of the village within which it
operates.
Following in the footsteps of Choy Yuen village, other cases of the
struggle of the non-indigenous population for land rights have now
increased awareness of the endangered nature of farming in the NT.
Another non-indigenous village threatened by development is Ma Shi
Po. Its case appeared in the press as the result of a controversial plan torezone of the Northeast New Territories (NENT) (Cheung et al., 2014).
In fact, this village is one of fifteen in the south of Yuen Long, the north of
Fanling, and in Kwu Tung North, which were all slated to be dismantled
as a consequence of the plan. The rezoning was designed to develop
and urbanize the greenbelt area between Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
Supposedly, the redevelopment would upgrade the regional economy toadvance tertiary industry, attract new talent to the area, and ease competition
for jobs and housing in overpopulated urban Hong Kong. But eliminating

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 105

the greenbelt would ultimately affect 250 million people living in an area of
7,000 square kilometres.
There is not room here to give a detailed report of this ongoing project.
Yet the fact that more and more young Hong Kongers have joined the nonindigenous villagers to oppose it over the past 3 years sends an importantmessage. Opponents have sought to highlight the significance of the area
as the only remaining greenbelt between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. And
their action has discursively expanded the meanings and geographies of
tradition.
Interestingly, with respect to the rezoning of the NENT, the indigenous
elite has not talked about farming as a tradition. Rather, they haveencouraged the would-be-displaced communities to compromise theirpersonal interest in the name of the public good, just as the indigenous
population was encouraged to give up their ownership rights to the land a
century ago. But in return there is no potential new ‘traditional right’ being
offered to the non-indigenous villagers in this case.
Juxtaposing this struggle by the non-indigenous population tocontinue farming with the longstanding effort by the indigenous villagers
to maintain their traditional rights raises significant issues that reflect on
the themes of agency and tradition that underlie this book. In particular,
it shows the contemporary power of tradition to serve as an instrument of(dis)connection. On the one hand, the indigenous elites are now insistingon perpetuating their special right to exclude others from developing
lands in the NT designated for village use, in the interest of ‘villagers’
who may no longer even reside there. On the other, non-indigenous
farmers are inviting people to join them in sustaining the borderlands as
a productive greenbelt between two globalizing cities, and in the process
they are extending the ‘grounded’ tradition of farming to a new generationof Hong Kong residents. It is worth asking whose practices offer a bettercase for safeguarding ‘the great difference’ identified by the former colonial
authorities as the basis for traditional rights in the first place.

Towards Unearthing Tradition[T]radition itself is lost, or transmuted into traditionalism, when it ceases to move
forward.

Susan Felch (2005)

A friend of mine, who is a university teacher and who rents one floor
in a typical three-storey small house, generously shared with me the viewof the serene NT countryside framed from her window. My friend and106 Whose Tradition?

most of her neighbours in the gated neighbourhood where they live are
not indigenous to the NT, nor are they necessarily aware of the ongoingchanges brought about by the houses in which they reside. What exactlyis this tradition, then, when the small houses built in its name are simply a
tradable property?
One cannot but recall the colonial gaze of the British officers whoestablished the basis for this condition. They believed it was crucial toallow the indigenous inhabitants to sustain the dwelling practices thatdifferentiated them from the urbanized population of Hong Kong. And
they believed that colonial governance would work more effectively andefficiently if two systems of land tenure were allowed to coexist in thecolony. Today, however, it is often the non-indigenous middle-class thatbuys or rents space in the small houses to benefit from the colonial gaze,and so perpetuate the two systems in the postcolonial city. Considering
this underlying reality, one has to question the reason for continuing todisconnect the inhabitants of small houses from the rest of Hong Kong.
This chapter has reviewed the historical context behind the creationof the SHP, which was supposedly enacted in an effort to protect thetraditional social organization embedded in access to village lands as partof an ancestral trust. It has also revealed how, within a rather short periodof time, the SHP has produced a privilege among the indigenous male
inhabitants to continue to build and profit from their right as if it were acommodity, without due respect for the negative effects it might have on
the surrounding ecology and village heritage.
It should be clear by now that the specific policy measure that foundits source in tradition was never equal to the tradition. However, theindigenous elite has not let anyone question the formula. Indeed, in midDecember 2015, several reports revealed that, due to political pressure, thegovernment had shelved for at least 10 years an effort to review the SHP.
Recently, the HYK also stated that it might bring the case of ‘traditionalrights’ to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, asymbolic move seen as challenging the autonomy of the HKSAR. Bothdevelopments suggest that the use of tradition remains central to politics inpostcolonial Hong Kong (Ng, 2015). Today they indicate that ‘the nationstate’ is now being asked to legitimize selectively the source of the tradition,even though the nation-state – as the arbiter of official built tradition(AlSayyad, 2004, p. 5) – in this case continues its unstable relation withthe postcolonial territory. Tradition, again, is used strategically as a (dis)connection to, at once, separate and connect, and ultimately to produce thesomewhat arbitrary differences that legitimize the tradition.

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 107

The invention of the indigenous and of their privilege to build small
houses serves as a living embodiment of how tradition may create privileges
and cleavages within a given population. In this case, practices related to
the SHP separate the privileged indigenous not only from the urbanitesof Hong Kong but also from the descendants of farmers who were largely
identical to them, but who migrated to the colony later as a result ofhistorical events in south China. When the colonial authority demarcatedthe NT from the mainland, the communities there were differentiatedfrom those living across the border, and in some cases villages that occupied
the borderlands were cut in two and became populated by two kinds ofpeople. A privilege, compensation, or a right (as the villagers would haveit) was created by this act of arbitrary separation, without consideration for
how the colonial project might eventually have an equally profound effecton people on the other side of the border. When the farmers living there
migrated to the NT, they suddenly became non-indigenous villagers, as if
the historical connection and mnemonic traditions of agronomy did notexist. That the invented tradition had been used to create a disconnect withthe past inevitably made its goal self-conflicting.
This chapter has described how certain indigenous residents of Hong
Kong have translated their tradition into a claim for special rights. However,this claim was founded on a presumption that the NT would be kept a
distinct territory from urban Hong Kong. Ironically, this claim may now
present a challenge to the ongoing top-down project to connect the cities of
the region across the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. In
a way, then, the indigenous communities and the non-indigenous farmers
are not necessarily without common interest, although it would be quitedifficult to imagine the two camps working together in the near future.
The case of Cascadia presented by Matthew Sparke (2004, pp. 112–13)
suggests that challenges to national sovereignty may succeed if claims fromdifferent communities can together ‘landscape’ the end of the nationstate. Success in this case, however, may engage the indigenous population
instrumentally without necessarily providing justice for those who havesuffered from being excluded from access to the land in the same territory.
Among these groups are both indigenous women and non-indigenous
communities, which arguably share a very similar ethnic background andlifestyle with the indigenous inhabitants.
This chapter has also examined the ways in which farming as amnemonic tradition may help revamp the notion of tradition. To unearth
tradition, it is not necessary to negate or oppose its authenticity but to seekout coeval existing traditions that may connect rather than disconnect or108 Whose Tradition?

disinherit lived memories across borders. Authenticity, as Colin Graham(2001, p. 63) has argued, is concurrent with the rise of the nation, andarises out ‘of contexts in which the nation becomes an active arbiter
between the past and a “people”… [It thus] combines the prioritizationof “origins” with the “pathos of incessant change”’. The invention of the
NT and of its indigenous inhabitants serves this purpose, and it continues
to strengthen the nation-state even if it took place literally outside theregime of postcolonial Hong Kong. It is such a continuation of governancefrom the outside that disallows different people from negotiating forthemselves to connect their multiple pasts with the future. By contrast,
the non-indigenous farmers’ resistance, as the case of Choy-Yuen village
demonstrates, unearths the mnemonic tradition embedded in farmingin the NT, to conceive an alternative future of connection rather thanseparation. Yet, the fact that the urban development agenda they are fighting
is a nationalist one, designed to connect people across the ambiguous border
between postcolonial Hong Kong and the mainland further complicatesthe context in which tradition serves as a (dis)connection.
The question of how to sustain a productive greenbelt that can bemeaningful to multiple parties and their understanding of tradition
remains a theoretical and political challenge that can only be explored infuture research. In particular, it raises the additional question of how toaccommodate similarly disadvantaged farmers living in mainland areas
across the Shenzhen River. Will it likewise be possible to include them in
the remaking of tradition, so that their plea to also farm the borderlands
will not be reduced to one of nationalism or traditionalism?
Perhaps it is necessary to review how tradition operates by examining‘Whose tradition?’ is at work and on what grounds. The ongoing task
then would be to search for a more inclusive process of engaging tradition
in a way that might be generative rather than deadening (Felch, 2005, p.
55). It would enable multiple communities to participate in and, more
importantly, to ensure that the ground of tradition remains fertile andproductive.

Notes
1.

2.
3.

The land practice allowed for ‘bottom-soil’ rights, which gave the owner a fixed rent
from a plot of land without any right to remove the renter or control use. See more in
Watson and Watson (2004).
For example, Pok Fu Lam is such a village, dated to at least the eighteenth century.
See more in Caritas Communities (2012).
Minutes of DOO Meeting of 10 June 1971, in Hong Kong Record Service (HKRS
563-2-39), p. 2.

Revamping Tradition: Contested Politics of ‘The Indigenous’ in Postcolonial Hong Kong 109

4.
5.

6.

7.

Legislative Council Sitting Record, 27 November 1902, pp.70–71. Available at:
http://www.legco.gov.hk/1902/h021127.pdf.
The resale soon led to an additional clause being added in 1976 to prevent villagers
selling to outsiders within 5 years of obtaining a Certificate of Compliance. An
amendment in 1979 permitted this non-assignment clause to be waived as long as
the full market premium was paid.
The Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department created the AgriculturalLand Rehabilitation Scheme in 1988 to encourage use of otherwise idle agriculturalland for productive farming.
See another recent case documented by Elaine Yau (2014).

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