tim's experiment

Hong Kong’s New Territories still have a good deal of rural charm. I lived in a village for five years and got on very well with my neighbours. They were all surnamed Li; it was that sort of village. The only reason we were able to buy a house in the village was because the Post Office, when numbering the houses to prepare for dour-to-door delivery, had allocated ours the catastrophically inauspicious number 44. But the Lis were very hospitable. We were invited to an annual feast outside the ancestral hall, the village lion dance team performed on our doorstep, for a small tip, at Chinese New Year, and our then small son ran in and out of everyone’s houses with the other kids, loosely supervised by a network of grandmas, elder sisters and domestic helpers.  I was even invited to clan meetings, not because I was expected to say anything, but because the village welfare fund, to which I had contributed, supplied free beer on these occasions and I was expected to drink my share. A small tree in our front garden had some traditional role in wedding folklore, so every time one of the village youngsters got married the happy couple would knock on our door and politely ask permission to take a twig.

This was very law-abiding of them because the tree overhung a public path and they could have just helped themselves. In other respects I fear my neighbours were not so fastidious. I did not inquire about the mysteriously high rate of comings and goings in the dog population, but you could not miss the firecrackers. We were up to our ears in them every New Year. Large lorries would sometimes appear in our little car park and I fear things sometimes fell off the back of them, as it were.

Still, on the whole I am a fan of the NT and all who dwell in it. But this scene is being ruined by greed. Or to give it its official name, the Small House Policy. This states that male descendants of the original villagers can apply for a plot to build a small house near their ancestral home. This produces a supply of houses which vastly exceeds the requirements of the indigenous population, many of whom have in any case emigrated. But the policy persists because it is a racket. It was a racket in the 80s, when a member of the Heung Yee Kuk complained that some members of the Kuk itself were participating, it was a racket in the 90s, when there seemed some prospect of it being stopped, and it is a racket now, when there is no such prospect at all because the Kuk is effectively a functional constituency and the continuation of the policy is the price of its support for the government.  In my village the Lis commonly built their small house with an outside staircase, so that they could let one or two of the upper floors and live in the rest. This is not quite what was intended but near enough. However the vast majority of village houses are built for people who have no intention of living in them, or indeed of living in Hong Kong. The indigenous villager has simply sold his signature on the necessary form to a developer. And as a result real villages are surrounded by an ill-planned accumulation of new houses, most of them inhabited by outsiders. A way of life is disappearing, and it is no consolation that the people who used to enjoy it are the ones selling it out.