A Village of One’s Own

An otherwise serene little Chinese village in remote Shek Kong in Yuen Long has been the site of quite an uproar recently. Called Choi Yuen Tsuen, this 50-year-old village is home to about 50 households, and most of the residents are elderly. But just a few months ago, the government told them they need to pack up and find new homes because their village will be demolished by the end of 2010 to make way for the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, a new high-speed train line connecting Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

The villagers are furious. They say the government never properly consulted them before they received an eviction notice at the end of 2008. The government claims that the village’s removal is the best solution after reviewing several proposals, saying that the arrangement can “minimize impact on the nearby residents and community.” The villagers will soon see their homes and farmlands of the past 50 years vanish—but just over the hill from them, mere feet away, sits a wide stretch of land used only for the storage of empty container terminals. It will not be disturbed during the construction of the railway—the villagers do not own this land; it is owned by “indigenous villagers.”

Many city dwellers have a tendency to lump everyone who lives in a rural village together as “villagers,” but in reality, only those who are descended from the paternal bloodline of residents living in villages that were established on or before 1898 can stake a claim to being “indigenous villagers.” This title confers special rights and privileges that ordinary villagers do not enjoy. The policy protecting the indigenous villagers began in colonial days as a way of garnering political capital in the New Territories—but has persisted past the handover, and is now enshrined in Article 40 of the Basic Law, which promises that “the lawful traditional rights and interests of the indigenous inhabitants of the New Territories shall be protected.” As a result, indigenous village land has been seen as a “no go area” in planning, which engineers avoid because dealing with them tends to slow down or utterly stop development.

The incident with the Choi Yuen Tsuen village highlights the discrepancy in the way the government handles matters relating to indigenous villagers versus non-indigenous villagers, which worries many experts, who ask why indigenous villagers still need to be treated differently.

But first, a little history. In 1983, the chairman of Heung Yee Kuk (the statutory advisory body that represents the interests of indigenous villagers), Lau Wong-fat, won a lawsuit that guaranteed the right of indigenous people to use their land as an open storage area without having to pay any fee for the change of the land’s use. Since then, parcels of green land all across the New Territories have turned into junkyards, container storage yards, and so on. This is most rampant in Yuen Long, such as in the container terminal site adjacent to the doomed village of Choi Yuen Tsuen.

Which leads Lo Chun-heung, a resident of Choi Yuen Tsuen who is leading the campaign to save his village, to ask, “How come the homes of indigenous villagers are more valuable than ours? We’ve all been living here for generations and we all call our village home. They have indigenous rights, but that shouldn’t take priority over our human rights.”

Every male indigenous villager descended from the paternal bloodline—yes, only the male, females need not apply—has the right to obtain 700 square feet of land within his village to build a three-storey house without having to pay any government rent. This may sound too good to be true to many city dwellers, but many defenders of indigenous villagers view this as a legitimate right, and that it actually may not go far enough. The vice-chairman of Heung Yee Kuk, Cheung Hok-ming, says that indigenous villagers are in fact victims of the new town developments of the 70s. “Bear in mind that these are our lands inherited from our ancestors,” says Cheung, who sees the entitlement as a feeble government measure to alleviate the rising housing problems in villagers because they had failed to re-settle them in public housing estates. “It’s just like the Indians in America,” he says, “every indigenous clan of people native to a place should be protected.”