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risk of providing technical knowledge for the justification of more development
(Man 2014). The Ma Shi Po rural activism has radically redefined the meaning
of local green activism by linking environmental concerns directly to the city’s
major developmental contradictions, namely the dominance of land developing
interests in the making of Hong Kong’s political economy and the everyday lives
of citizens. This chapter shows how the case of rurally based Ma Shi Po activism
has made it possible for a very different kind of Hong Kong to be imagined—from
a colonial space solely occupied with land developer–led economic growth to one
that stresses family roots, community development, and urban agriculture. This
chapter draws on my visits, from 2011 onward, to the Ma Shi Po community and
on interviews with the activists and participants in its farming course, baking class,
and farm tours. It also draws on extensive media reports on Ma Shi Po from 2012
to 2014 to examine the way the movement is represented and evaluated.
Ma Shi Po: A remaining germ of farming in the city
The city of Hong Kong is mainly composed of three major areas: the Hong Kong
Island, the Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories, which include many
outlying islands. Ma Shi Po village is located in Fanling, the northeastern part of
the New Territories, close to the Hong Kong–China border. The existing literature
on the New Territories is largely anthropological and investigates its ancient
village traditions, rites and rituals, and lineage politics (Watson and Watson 2004).
However, the New Territories is no longer simply an area of rural villages and
quiet farmland as, in the last two decades, the urban sprawl of Hong Kong Island
and the Kowloon Peninsula has spread northward. New towns, big malls, and a
booming population are becoming common features of some parts of the New
Territories. Farmlands still remain, but these are also undergoing radical changes.
Big land developers have been buying up thousands of hectares of farmlands in
the New Territories from the families of early settlers who came to the region a few
hundred years ago. These early settlers’ indigenous identity and landownership,
however, need to be understood in the historical context of Britain’s wars with
China over trading ports in the South China Sea. The British seized Hong Kong
Island in the first Opium war in 1842 and the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and
“leased” the New Territories in 1898. In order to pacify the Chinese, the British
government acknowledged the traditional rights and customs of those inhabitants
who settled in “the New Territories” before 1898 but not those who came later
and those outside of it. “Indigenous inhabitants” of Hong Kong is, therefore, a
special category of British colonialism in the region as it endorses land rights
for only a limited group of people with ancestors in the New Territories and only
before 1898. This British legacy not only creates much conflict among local
inhabitants who settle in Hong Kong at different times and places; it also becomes
a major source of contention as it complicates the plans of real estate developers.
Indeed, real estate developers began buying farmlands directly from “indigenous
landowners” when it was cheap in the 1990s and before the government was able
to implement planning regulations. In the process, developers turned the farmland