Neither land nor water is likely to become a surplus commodity in tomorrow’s Hong Kong.
“On our small and peculiar land area, it would be impossible to reach a high order of self-sufficiency in food production.”—W. J. BLACKIE, former Hong Kong Director of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry
For more than a thousand years men have wrested a precarious living from the farms and fishing grounds of the New Territories, yet they remained outside the economic and social orbit of Hong Kong until a few months after World War II.
Politically, the New Territories had been part of the British crown colony since 1898. Nevertheless, the people of this scrambled-egg land mass and the 235 islands around it had held their interest in its British rulers to the legal minimum. The British themselves, passing through the New Territories on their way to the Fanling golf course or the Chinese border, viewed the region and its people with the fixed indifference of a New York commuter rolling over the swampy monotony of the Jersey meadows.
This reciprocal insularity broke down at last under the pressure of two events which have touched and twisted the lives of almost everyone in contemporary Hong Kong: the Japanese Occupation of World War II and the rise of Communist China. To the people of the New Territories, the Japanese interlude was an economic disaster; denuding their forests, depleting their livestock and impoverishing their fishing fleet. Both the Japanese and the Communists drove thousands of refugees into the New Territories to compete with resident farmers for scarce marginal land. The Communists further disrupted things by closing the China market to New Territories produce and by forcing colony fishermen to keep twelve miles away from its coast and its islands.
The four main Chinese groups in the New Territories, the Cantonese and Hakka farmers, and the Hoklo and Tanka fishermen, were no more severely shaken by all this than were the British. When the Japanese and the Communists had done their work, the British and the urban Chinese of Hong Kong found themselves dependent as never before on the fish and produce of the New Territories. The picturesque, faraway people of the countryside had come into sudden, sharp focus as instruments of the colony’s survival.