The Hong Kong Chinese villages in the New Territories were for long thought to be intact and unchanged under the British colonial policy of indirect rule, which claimed to recognize Chinese tradition and customary practices in its governance of these rural settlements from 1898 to 1997. This explains why some earlier anthropological studies of the New Territories would take these indigenous village communities as a legitimate research object to observe the authentic features of traditional Chinese society, particularly the old lineage system, land tenure, popular religious belief and village customs. Few scholars today adhere to this Orientalist fallacy that essentializes the New Territories as a monolithic tempo-spatial Other and affirms the discourse of British colonial governance of rural districts in academic circles. Indigeneity in the New Territories has long been perceived as a peculiar case of British coloniality that is much more than the original form of Chinese traditionality. The so-called Chinese tradition in the New Territories emerged as a by-product of colonial inventions, ideological constructs, political negotiations and historical transformations. No aspect of the rural organizations and life in the New Territories is static and primordial without intersecting the wider social, economic and political contexts.
Following this paradigmatic shift in the scholarly literature, Hong Kong Rural Women under Chinese Rule by Isabella Ng offers a nicely composed, well-researched and gender-sensitive ethnographic study, articulating the latest rural issues in the New Territories. In doing so, Ng not only deepens the reflection upon the British colonial legacy but also advances many path-breaking observations regarding post-colonial practices under Chinese rule since 1997. Ng highlights a great variety of female agency in relation to colonial and post-colonial encounters, and presents abundant first-hand findings and insights for future researchers to ponder.
In the name of cultural sensitivity and political non-interventionism, an essential ruling strategy of the British colonizers in the New Territories was to absorb the rural Chinese patriarchs as co-rulers into the ruling structure, authorizing them with exclusive political privileges, official power and landholding interests. Ng's work takes a closer look into the perversely gendered impacts arising from the formulation of the Small House Policy in 1972. She produces a sharp feminist account of how this under-explored colonial legacy ramified a rigid patrilineal formalization of the indigenous identity and an extremely agnatic political and economic operation built on the real estate development in the New Territories. According to Ng, the rapid commodification of landed properties with lucrative profits turned this colonial policy into a pressing tension that continues to shape the rural developmental policy of the current Chinese rule and their collaborations with the rural patriarchs. Ng adds a valuable reference to the intricate state–people relationship in the New Territories from the late colonial era to the present.
The long colonial-cum-patriarchal dominance over the New Territories was never all-powerful. Rural women have constantly exercised their agency to articulate their own rights. The Indigenous Women's Inheritance Movement (1992–94) posed a historical challenge against the gendered colonial rule over the New Territories. Most existing studies concentrate on how this large-scale feminist action successfully pushed the government to pass a bill into an ordinance that permitted indigenous women to have equal inheritance rights. Ng carefully highlights the real impacts of the ordinance upon grassroots gender relations, and raises the question of why the enactment of gender equality in law fails to transform the reality in practice. Her ethnographic findings inspire us to realize that the post-colonial gender relations in rural communities in the New Territories remain much the same as in the past colonial era. Ng refers to the rural women as being “double-colonised and triple-marginalised” (p. 15) by the British colonial government, by the New Territories patriarchs and by their urban Hong Kong counterparts. Together with the internal differentiation from their generational difference and living experiences, the rural women have found themselves confined into profoundly divided worlds with different career situations and opportunities. This egregiously undermines the collectivity necessary for their struggle to change gendered rural practice. The persistence of an extremely patriarchal system in the New Territories continues till now.
Under the new Chinese rule, the local state policy to accelerate the integration of Hong Kong with mainland China through economic development and market attraction constantly blurs the internal rural–urban divide. Rapid urbanization of the rural environment, drastic transformation of rural practices and a constant increase of urban-to-rural migrants occur in the New Territories. Will the rural communities in the New Territories irreversibly decline under the new political and economic arrangement? Will the British colonial notion of indigeneity eventually become history? Will the rural Chinese patriarchs instead gain new political and economic resources to maintain the post-colonial state-led developmentalism? What is the possible future for the rural female rights campaign in the New Territories? How will rural women exert their agential influence into the political domain of the New Territories? Ng's timely and relevant work provides us with a wide range of useful ethnographic materials and insights for further investigations into the gender politics related to China's current appeal to utilitarian patriotism for systemic control in the case of rural Hong Kong.
