Farming against real estate dominance 181water) but also, in recent years, economic growth and jobs through tourism from
the mainland. Many citizens consider that this increasing dependence on China
threatens the autonomy that Hong Kong enjoys under the Sino-British agreement of
“One country Two systems”. They hence believe that Hong Kong is becoming more
vulnerable to interventions from Beijing in its public sphere—in such areas as its
press, and freedom of speech more generally, and in determining candidates for local
government elections. There is a growing local movement that aims to reestablish a
sense of Hong Kong’s cultural distinctiveness and unique colonial identity in order
to resist increasing influence from China. In this context, even though the Ma Shi Po
campaign is mainly about preserving urban farm communities, it is inevitably part
of broader social debates about Hong Kong politics, local identity and the future
of development. It also raises many questions about whether Hong Kong should
integrate more with mainland China through urban growth or maintain a certain
distance through reviving traditional farming communities.
Conclusion
On June 6, 2014, several hundred protesters, composed mainly of tenant farmers
and university students, had a large-scale sit-in outside of the Legislative Council
(Legco) Building when the finance committee met to approve the budget for the
initial engineering works of the northeastern New Territories Development Plan.
The rally successfully interrupted the meeting after protestors stormed into the
building, breached security lines, and forced the government to schedule a second
finance committee meeting. Knowing that the Ma Shi Po campaign would mobilize
even more supporters against the second meeting, the Legco and the Hong Kong
police responded by raising the security level and zoning away the protest area from
the main building (Chong and Cheung 2014). The event drew more attention to the
new social activism and provoked heated debate about the conventional economic
growth model, the city’s housing shortage, and changing young people’s aspirations.
The Ma Shi Po campaign may have originally intended to defend a small
group of tenants’ resident rights and forge a grassroots response to government
land planning in the New Territories, but the movement has grown to become a
major local movement in post-1997 politics and has provoked reflection on the
identity and direction of Hong Kong society. In this chapter, I have argued that
the efforts of Ma Shi Po rural activists to preserve farmland in the New Territories
have formed a major site of “counter-hegemonic democratic politics” (Dirlik and
Prazniak 2001, p. 3) in Hong Kong in the last few years by mounting a critique of
the prevailing models of real estate development and urban planning and the loss
of local rural communities. Through petitioning against the demolition of a small
farming village, the movement has staged a lifestyle-based and yet highly political
environmental campaign that touches on global environmental concerns, lifestyle
consumption practices, local community development, and the socioeconomic
problems that are specific to Hong Kong.
I argue that the rural activism in Ma Shi Po has been successful in sparking new
public debate about farming by casting it as a political concern that has several