Memory making, identitity building: The Dynamics of Economics and Politics in the New Territories of Hong Kong

China Information

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 66-91

  Chan, Selina Ching ^a  

^a NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE   (Singapore)

Author keywords

forgetting; indigenous inhabitants; memory; New Territories; past; tradition

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992829135     PISSN: 0920203X     EISSN: 1741590X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0920203X0301700103     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Maurice Freedman, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London: Athlone Press, 1958); Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (London: Athlone Press, 1966); Hugh Baker, “The Five Great Clans of the New Territories,” Journal ofthe Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 6 (1966): 25-48; Hugh Baker, A Chinese Lineage Village: Sheung Shui (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1968); David Faure, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1986); Rubie Watson, Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in Chinese Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and James Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975).
2. An exception is found in Allen Chun's work in which he examines the role of the colonial government in shaping the changing discourse of land in the New Territories; see Allen Chun, Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of “Land” in the New Territories ofHong Kong (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2000).
3. This date is the time when the British started to lease the New Territories for ninety-nine years. The term “indigenous inhabitants” is a political construct for the identification of the “earlier settlers” (indigenous inhabitants), as distinct from the British and the later immigrants in Hong Kong; Selina Chan, “Negotiating Tradition: Customary Succession in the New Territories of Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong: The Anthropology ofa Chinese Metropolis, ed. G. Evans and M. Tam (Hawaii: Curzon Press, 1997). Today, many of these inhabitants continue to live in the villages of the New Territories while some others have migrated to Europe as restaurant workers since the 1950s (R. Watson, Inequality among Brothers; Selina Chan, “Politicizing Tradition: The Identity of Indigenous Inhabitants in Hong Kong,” Ethnology 37, no. I (1998): 39-54). In this article, I use the terms “indigenous inhabitants” and “villagers” interchangeably.
4. Before 1997, Hong Kong history was taught in its universities and tertiary institutions only. Since 1998, Hong Kong history has been taught in history lessons in secondary schools.
5. Robert Groves, “Militia Market and Lineage: Chinese Resistance to the Occupation of Hong Kong's New Territories in 1899,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch ofthe Royal Asiatic Society 9 (1969): 31-64.
6. Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy, “Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 6 (1997): 921-36; Barry Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 221-36.
7. The Heung Yee Kuk was established on 1926 by indigenous villagers and has acted as a leader in protecting the interests, mainly land, of the indigenous inhabitants in the New Territories throughout the process of “modernization.” Hereafter, I shall refer to the Heung Yee Kuk simply as Kuk.
8. Barry Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 909-27.
9. Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (1991): 376-420; Olick and Levy, “Collective Memory”; Jun Jing, The Temples of Memories: History, Power and Moralities in a Chinese Temple (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
10. In addition, memories in many colonies are negotiated by the indigenous people in order to resist the prevailing regime. As observed in the Pacific islands, the remembrance and reinvention of tradition by the indigenous minorities is a crucial means for resistance against the colonial rulers; Robert Norton, “Culture and Identity in the South Pacific: A Comparative Analysis,” Man 28, no. 4 (1993): 741-59; Rodger Keesing, “Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific 1 (1989): 1942; Joycelyn Linnekin, “On the Theory and Policies of Cultural Construction in the Pacific,” Oceania 62, no. 4 (1992): 249--63; Robert Borofsky, Making History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). In the case of socialist countries, resistance is fostered when people remember their “secret past”; Rubie Watson, “Making Secret Histories: Memory and Mourning in Post-Mao China,” in Memory, History, and Opposition: Under State Socialism, ed. R. Watson (New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1994), 65-86; Caroline Humphrey, “Remembering an “Enemy”: The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth-Century Mongolia,” in Memory, History, and Opposition, 21-44; Paul Pickowicz, “Memories of Revolution and Collectivization in China: The Unauthorized Reminiscences of a Rural Intellectual,” in Memory, History, and Opposition, 127-48.
11. The New Territories comprise over two hundred small islands and parts of the Chinese mainland. It includes the area from the north of Boundary Street in Kowloon to the south of Sham Chun River and Deep Bay. In 1842, Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in perpetuity by the Treaty of Nanking. In 1860, the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters’ Island were also ceded to Britain in perpetuity.
12. The majority of the residents in today's New Territories and Hong Kong are recent migrants who moved into the area since the 1940s.
13. Fred Chiu, “Politics and the Social Body in Colonial Hong Kong,” Positions 4, no. 2 (1996): 185-303; in fact, the Kuk started off as a pressure group called “The New Territories Agriculture, Industry and Commerce Research Association” in 1924 (see Ming Kwan Lee, “The Evolution of the Heung Yee Kuk as a Political Institution,” in From Village to City: Studies in the Traditional Roots ofHong Kong Society, ed. David Faure, James Hayes, and Alan Birchs (Hong Kong: Center of Asian Studies, 1984), 167-77.
14. S. W. K. Chiu and H. F. Ho, “The Paradox of Stability Revisited: Colonial Development and State Building in Rural Hong Kong,” China Information 12, nos. 1/2 (1997): 66-96.
15. Selina Chan, “Colonial Policy in a Borrowed Place and Time: Invented Tradition in the New Territories of Hong Kong,” European Planning Studies 7, no. 2 (1999): 231-42.
16. Mamdani Mahmood, Citizen and Subject: Decentralized Despotism and the Legacy ofLate Colonialism (Oxford: University Press, 1997).
17. Chun, Unstructuring Chinese Society.
18. This had to do with the socio-economic changes in Hong Kong over the past century, having been transformed from a fishing village to a cosmopolitan city. The changes include the transformation from rice-growing to vegetable cultivation in the 1950s, the emigration of younger members to Europe, the influx of population from China to Hong Kong, economic diversification in the 1960s, and the sales of rural land by the New Territories inhabitants from the 1970s to the 1990s. Indeed, both land sales and emigration had marked the transformation into an urbanized society; Selina Chan, “Selling Ancestors’ Land: A Hong Kong Lineage Adapts,” Modern China 27, no. 2 (200 I): 262-84. With a large number of immigrants coming from China and the increased need for land in industrialization, the government started to develop the New Territories and acquired much rural land from the villagers. These changes had therefore “forced” the New Territories into “modernization.”
19. Chun, Unstructuring Chinese Society, 144.
20. For more details on the evolution of the Kuk, see Lee, “The Evolution of the Heung Vee Kuk,” 167. As urbanization began, a huge number of people moved into the New Territories. In those early days, these new migrants, living in the private and public estates, would forward their complaints concerning their living environment to the Housing Authority and the Regional Council rather than the Kuk. This practice has continued till the present day. Thus the Kuk today only takes care of the interests of the indigenous inhabitants in the New Territories villages. It mainly deals with four aspects of social life: charitable work, local interests, customs and activities, and local grievances (Chiu and Ho, “The Paradox of Stability Revisited”). The Kuk is the highest political organization within the New Territories’ three-tier system-village representatives, rural committee, and the Kuk. At the lowest level, village representatives are elected by their respective villagers. All the village representatives are granted seats in the rural committee at the district level. Within every rural committee, the members would elect a chairman and a deputy. The holders of these two positions in each rural committee are then automatically entitled to enter the Kuk.
21. Chiu and Ho, “The Paradox of Stability Revisited,” discuss the factions within the Kuk in detail.
22. Chun, Unstructuring Chinese Society, 147.
23. The New Territories Community of Hong Kong under Colonial Administration (1977) is a document addressed to Lord Gorony-Roberts, then Minister for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
24. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 202.
25. Chan, “Politicizing Tradition.”
26. Robert Groves, “Militia Market and Lineage: Chinese Resistance to the Occupation of Hong Kong's New Territories in 1899,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch ofthe Royal Asiatic Society 9 (1969): 31-64.
27. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),43.
28. Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System,” 911.
29. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 114.
30. Unlike the rest of the Hong Kong people who, being mostly immigrants, are ignorant of this period of Hong Kong history.
31. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 92-93, 114.
32. Chiu, “Politics and the Social Body,” 191-93.
33. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 113.
34. Emily Ahem, Chinese Rituals and Politics (Cambridge: University Press, 1981).
35. Stephen Feuchtwang, The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Religion in China (London: Routledge, 1992), 8.
36. R. Watson, “Making Secret Histories,” 77.
37. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 35; Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 2 (1995): 214-39.
38. Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”
39. R. Watson, “Making Secret Histories,” 72.
40. Feuchtwang, The Imperial Metaphor, 8-9, 21.
41. In the last few years of the colonial regime, the general public mostly paid little attention to the British colonialists. The media also tended to give higher priority to the speeches and actions of the Chinese government.
42. Wen hui bao, 1 July 1996.
43. Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996),698.
44. South China Morning Post, 1 July 1997.
45. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans!. L. A. Coser (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 51-53.
46. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 14-15.
47. Janet Carsten, “The Politics of Forgetting: Migration, Kinship and Memory on the Periphery of the Southeast Asian State,” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 1, no. 2 (1995): 317-35.
48. Zelizer, “Reading the Past,” 220.
49. Ming pao, 6 July 1997.
50. Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. 1. Gillis (Princeton: University Press, 1994), 127--47.
51. Ming Daily, 6 July 1997.
52. Neil Jarman, “Troubled Images,” Critique ofAnthropology 12, no. 2 (1992): 133-65.
53. Ming pao, 27 July 1997.
54. Migrant-villagers came here for different reasons and over different periods. They hence have different attitudes toward the PRC and the colonial government, causing them to hold distinct memories of the past. Those who came in 1949-1950 fled for political reasons while later immigrants were economic refugees.
55. The rest of Hong Kong people, who are mainly migrants from China, often have unpleasant memories of their experiences under the Chinese communist regime there.
56. In fact, emigration started long ago in the late 1950s and most of those who wanted to live in Western countries had already left.
57. Adopting Tu's phraseology; Wei Ming Tu, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” Daedalus 120, no. 2 (1991): 1-32.
58. Gillis, Commemorations, 3.