Govern Mentality and Power in Politially Contested Space by Airriess

Governmentality and power in politicallycontested space: refugee farming in

Hong Kong’s New Territories, 1945e1970

Christopher A. Airriess

Department of Geography, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, USA

Abstract

A small proportion of Mainland Chinese refugee flows into British Hong Kong following the 1949 Com-munist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China were vegetable farmers, who by the late 1960s engen-dered a vegetable revolution in New Territories agricultural space. Heterogeneous actors and their di!eringmodalities of power in the late-colonial government possessed an active managerial role in this vegetable rev-olution anchored in issues of marketing and land tenure. While post-World War Two developmentalist on-tologies help explain government intervention in the post-war agricultural economy, this research focusesprimarily on the disciplinary techniques deployed within the governance rationalities of the early ColdWar period to cultivate pro-government loyalties among a potentially proletarianized, trans-border refugeefarming population perceived by colonial authorities as being susceptible to Communist influence. As ‘exper-imental space’, marketing innovations were a qualified success, but progress in land reform failed because ofthe local geopolitical context of colonial rule in the contested space of the New Territories.! 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Hong Kong; Governmentality; Foucault; Peri-urban farming; Cold War; Colonialism

Introduction

By and large, the work of the new settlers in Hong Kong, especially of the New Territories, isremarkable. It is absolutely amazing the way in which some of the Chinese peasants whocome from Red China get on.1

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This excerpted 1959 quote from Dudley Stamp, Britain’s foremost applied rural land use geog-rapher with substantial work experience in British colonial possessions, hints at the radical post-World War Two transformation of New Territories’ agricultural space without much personalknowledge of the colonial government project that was instrumental in managing the constructionof this productive peri-urban vegetable farming landscape. This ‘vegetable revolution’ lasted some30 years until the mid-1970s when industrial and residential development in the New Territoriessignaled the beginning of a long-term decline and abandonment of agricultural space.2 Most NewTerritories vegetable farmers were refugees from neighboring Guangdong Province and Britishcolonial o"cials perceived them as being problematic in the context of the Cold War geopoliticsbased upon their potential proletarian/tenant status. Because the international boundary as a toolto spatially delimit the contrasting political systems between the leased New Territories and Chinabecame far more rigid after World War Two, it is important to perceive the colonial project ofmodernizing agriculture as a package of techniques to manage both space and political identityon the colony’s northern geographical margins.

This research harnesses a Foucauldian perspective, particularly his later contributions ongovernmentality as developed by Dean3 and Rose and Miller4, to examine the rationalities ofcolonial practices and forms of state intervention that directly impacted the vegetable economyin the New Territories during the politically ‘critical phase’ of the 1945e1949 Cold War period.5

After a brief theoretical section, I describe the pre-World War Two contours of New Territories’agricultural development to establish that World War Two suggests a discontinuity between sov-ereignty and governmentality, followed by a description of the post-World War Two refugeepopulation influx and vegetable producing economy as a foundational backdrop to analyze thetechniques of late-colonial governmentality. The primary colonial project that transformedthe state’s disciplinary power in shaping the conduct of the refugee farming population wasthe Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO). As a governmental technique expressive of pas-toral power, the VMO is viewed as a qualified success because of its heterotopic and thus pater-nalistic foundations in the transformation of an objectified refugee population within the largerCold War context. The same government actors responsible for the success of the VMO were,however, unable to fulfill their geographical imaginations of the New Territories as ‘experimentalspace’ to include greater land tenure rights for refugee tenant vegetable farmers. The rationale ofthose more powerful government actors blocking land reform rested on the illusion of preservingnative custom which dovetailed with their spatial practices promoting political security in theCold War context.

Archival materials in the form of administrative memoranda are the primary source materialsused to uncover the nature of colonial governance. In focusing upon the colonial state’s gover-nance, in a sense adopting the view of the colonizers rather than those being disciplined, thismethodology could be criticized for ignoring the peasantry6 by privileging the ‘colonial state’s au-tobiography’.7 While the nature of this present post-structuralist research perspective is most con-cerned with isolating the governance discourse of the colonial state which naturally includes thesefictions that constitute situated or partial knowledge,8 there does exist a ‘counter-archive’ of thesubaltern colonized through deconstructing the discourse of the colonizers.9 Lastly, the use of co-lonial memoranda reinforces the notion that colonialism is not a monolithic endeavor because thedocuments reveal deep epistemological cleavages among colonial state actors concerning modal-ities of governmentality.10

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Situating theoretical considerations

The application of a Foucauldian perspective on political economy is well suited to examine thecolonial government’s management of refugee vegetable farmers because while this research doesconceive a post-World War Two developmental liberalism as a driving force in reordering NewTerritories agricultural space, it also assumes, like Foucault, that ‘theoretical materials must belaid over specific events and phenomena under study’ to ensure ‘that the concepts deployedhave not so much an a priori character’.11 The Hong Kong context is indeed atypical; describedas being ‘an exception to ordinary rules’12 and a ‘political history [that] makes nonsense of thedecolonising process’,13 the Crown Colony’s governors always possessed a large degree of decisionmaking autonomy from London, and when compared to other dependencies, the Colonial O"ceknew very little about Hong Kong.14

Foucault was also concerned with the role of institutions in managing marginalized or ‘other’spaces and populations. In this respect, Foucault speaks of heterotopias as spaces in which an‘alternate social ordering is performed’.15 There exist two di!erent forms of heterotopias; one beingcrisis heterotopias and the other, heterotopias of deviance such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals orrest homes.16 Refugees would certainly be perceived as a deviant population because of their ‘up-rooted’ nature and their liminal national loyalties. Losing an attachment to place, refugees be-come objectified as being ‘undi!erentiated raw material’ lacking a moral and political compassand thus threatening public safety and endangering political stability. The rationale of govern-mentality in the context of the Cold War and development goals resulted in refugees needing spe-cial therapeutic interventions because of their pathological condition caused by spatialdisplacement.17 While agricultural cooperatives in general are institutions of alternate social order-ing because they are government constructed ‘emplacement’ projects to revolutionize the existingspatial pattern of how agricultural goods are produced and distributed, the VMO’s heterotopicnature is amplified because its membership is primarily composed of refugees.18

Another avenue in which Foucault informs our knowledge of the way the colonial governmentmanaged the vegetable revolution and refugee population in the New Territories is through hisnotions of government mentalities and modalities of power, specifically applied to the 20th cen-tury welfare state.19 The first modality of power is based on the ‘cities and citizens’ governmen-tality model in which the state harnesses its disciplinary techniques to manage an orderly andsubject population anchored in a legal and political structure based on equality within a politicalcommunity. This is contrasted with a church-based pastoral power anchored in moral and ethicalties forming social solidarity in the ‘shepherd-flock’ model. With governments in the late 19th andearly 20th centuries realizing that political rationalities must also include social dimensions, publicinstitutions could no longer achieve order and security through law, but account for the socialdomain as well.20 Foucault explores the genealogy of how pastoral power was incorporatedinto a more modern state governmentality.21 There emerged, however, an inherent disjunctionbetween the application of these two modalities of power, particularly with reference to govern-mentality and social justice.22 These modalities of power schema contrasting pastoral power andgovernmentality are ideally suited for examining the vegetable revolution in the New Territoriesbecause agents of the Roman Catholic Church were instrumental in the VMOs formation andwere at the forefront, albeit unsuccessful, in the e!ort to persuade agents in the colonial

765C.A. Airriess / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 763e783

government to alter land tenure traditions based on the rationale of social justice in contrast tocolonial government mentalities anchored in part, by imagined legal and political rationalities.

Sovereignty in the pre-World War Two context

World War Two functioned as a discontinuity that ushered in a di!erent colonial rationalitywith its attendant configurations of power associated with the transition from sovereignty to gov-ernmentality, and from a conception of the state as territory to one of economy.23 Ten years be-fore the Japanese invasion, the New Territories accounted for 13% of the Crown Colony’spopulation of 774,501,24 but 82% of land space. Agriculture in pre-World War Two periodwas based almost exclusively on a two crop padi rice culture, coupled with a handful of secondarycrops and vegetables for home consumption with some sold in nearby village markets.25 Vegetableproduction did increase dramatically by the late 1930s as vegetable farmers comprised 21% of theNew Territories population26 and supplied approximately 20% of the vegetables consumed in thecolony27 in response to the late 1930s immigration of Guangdong vegetable agriculturalists southin advance of the Japanese invasion of South China.28

Government inattention to agricultural matters was a priori evident because unlike most Brit-ish colonies that possessed an administratively distinct Agricultural Department by the 1940s, thischange did not come to Hong Kong until after the war; indeed, Hong Kong was the last colonialpossession in the British Empire to initiate such bureaucratic change.29 A 1938 request by Super-intendent Flippance of the Botanical and Forestry Department to Government House for the for-mation of an Agricultural Department was turned down because of the financial cost.30 TheSuperintendent’s memorandum possessed a pastoral power discourse as he claims with referenceto Hong Kong that ‘the lack of balance between agriculture and trade is now universally recog-nized as a modern evil to be redressed’.31 Such an argument mirrors a moral-based governmen-tality characteristic in Britain during the inter-war years.32 While these metropolitan-basedgovernmentality arguments resulted in state intervention during the 1930s in other colonial pos-sessions,33 little action transpired in Hong Kong in part because its civil service was perceived asparticularly lethargic, parochial, and ‘Mandarinized’.34 Small e!orts, however, were taken to im-prove the colony’s pre-war agricultural economy. Four separate pre-war economic commissionsaddressed issues relating to vegetable production, agricultural indebtedness35 and the establish-ment of agricultural cooperatives.36

Because the pre-WorldWar Two raison d’ etre of the colony was anchored in trade and industry,government mentalities did not include agricultural development. Occupied by Punti and Hakkalandlords, the primary concern of colonial authorities in the New Territories was to keep orderand promote peaceful conditions under the model of sovereignty.37 While such traditional politi-co-economic descriptions naturally point to a system of indirect rule based on local custom, Chuncontests these assumptions by claiming that British indirect rule in the New Territories was an‘illusion’ because the colonial government assumed the functionary role of a land manager throughthe collection of taxes and the creation of new tenure laws based on modifying Chinese custom.38

While Chun’s observation is correct, these state functions are only a thin veneer of a deepening ofgovernmentality following World War Two. Applied in a general way, Giddens39 describes thistransformation as ‘an important shift in relations between the scope and intensity of rule’. In no


sense could we describe the pre-war colonial government as one of governmentality whereby pop-ulations were disciplined through a multitude of programs for the direction of conduct.40

Objects of discipline: the refugee influx

During the Japanese occupation of World War Two, the Crown Colony’s population decreasedsubstantially from 1,639,337 in 1941 to 650,000 in 1945. By 1951, the population reached two mil-lion based largely upon the flow of refugees from densely populated and neighboring GuangdongProvince, the traditional source region of Hong Kong immigrants. In part because of these refu-gee flows, the population of the New Territories increased to 200,000 in 1951 and by 1961, ap-proximately 44% of the New Territories population were refugees.41 Economic conditions werea critical push factor because in the early years of the Communist regime, southern China,from which most refugees originated, was economically neglected by Beijing.42 The most commoneconomic reasons for rural refugees entering Hong Kong were shortages of fertilizer, insu"cientfood rations, and lack of opportunities to cultivate private plots.43 By 1961 almost 70% of the16,414 New Territories vegetable farmers were born in counties surrounding Canton and Macau,and elsewhere in Guangdong.44

Land tenancy was closely associated with refugee vegetable cultivation. In the immediate trans-border sub-districts, for example, 61% of total agricultural acreage was cultivated by tenants andapproximately half the total acreage was under vegetable cultivation in the early 1950s; acreagededicated to vegetables expanded substantially throughout the 1960s (Fig. 1). Even in TsuenWan, a soon to be industrial node in the southwestern New Territories, 72% of total acreagewas under vegetable cultivation, and 40% of cultivators were ‘outsiders’.45 Refugee vegetablefarmers rented land from agnatic landowners which were increasingly being freed up for refugeevegetable production because of out migration to seek nearby urban-based wage employment. In-digenous villagers were reluctant to sell their land to vegetable growing immigrants because easyprofit could be made from renting land to tenant farmers rather than growing rice, of rapidly ris-ing land values as the New Territories became more urbanized, and of the symbolic capital ofowning land associated with lineage ideology.46 Without land or house ownership, refugee tenantfarmers were non-citizens in these villages, and thus were socially and politically marginalized andnot recognized as part of the village community.47

Vegetable production increased dramatically to meet the needs of the burgeoning urban popula-tion. Between 1953 and 1975, vegetable cultivation as a percentage of the total stock of land in ag-riculture experienced an almost eight fold increase, paralleled by a decrease in paddy rice from 70 to9%of total land in agriculture. As a result, the CrownColony’s level of vegetable self-su"ciency in-creased from 20% in the late 1930s to 60% in 1956, and 75% by 1961. While the tenant vegetablefarmers rented abandoned padi land for cultivation, a significant amount of padi land was simplyleft fallow. In 1953, unused land comprised 8.1%of agricultural space, but by1975 increased to 29%.

Transforming the post-war episteme of government

The establishment of the VMO as an interventionist colonial project intersected with the shiftof a larger colonial mentality in the management of subject peoples. The pre-war sovereignty


rationality of favoring administration and law rather than education and public health changed asthe mentality of the British Labor government toward developing their colonial possessions wit-nessed a sea change, one that entailed a ‘rediscovery of the territory’ for Britain.48 The poor andmarginalized colonial populations thus became objects of knowledge and management which re-quired constructive government intervention through the larger rationale of development49 basedon governmentality in which a more benevolent colonial government devised the rules of author-ity so that development could be ‘carefully planned and carefully controlled’.50 This new rational-ity was based upon an imperial moral order51 that promoted ‘good government’ not as anoverarching philosophy or principle,52 but as a collection of political attitudes among those inpower using Britain as a normative reference.53 As a result, a new ‘conduct of relationships’54

emerged in which a governmental rationality sought to produce e!ects of power in the self-regu-lating field of the social,55 which in turn engendered the reconstruction of colonial space,56 and thesubsequent centralization of colonial power to produce empowerment or self-determinationamong colonial subjects.

Fig. 1. Distribution of vegetable agriculture in the New Territories, 1969. Source: Adapted from data collected by C. T. Wong,Agricultural and Fisheries Department, Hong Kong.


A critical technique of government to achieve this new episteme of a more social government57

was the Colonial Welfare and Development Act of 1940, and amended versions of the same Act in1945, 1949 and 1950, that dispersed monies to the colonies in the form of both loans and grants58;significant funds were dedicated to agricultural, forestry, and veterinarian services.59 Indeed, partof this new mentality was the creation of the Colonial Agricultural Service in 1935 dedicated tothe more e"cient production of food crops in colonial possessions60 so that peasant producersmight be able to live in ‘healthy, contented and prosperous communities’.61 Also included inthis new colonial economic mentality was the cooperative marketing of agricultural food prod-ucts.62 Development planning in post-war Hong Kong, however, was embedded in the construc-tion of Cold War politics. The colonial government was concerned that the colony not be used asa stage for Communist and Nationalist ideological battles and thus threatening the stability ofcolonial rule. More important was the parallel concern that Communist political activity mightcause unrest among the ballooning refugee population and thus promote problems associatedwith irredentism.63 Indeed, as Smart64 rightly claims with reference to squatters and the originsof the colonial government’s public housing program in Hong Kong’s urban space, the natureof government intervention was influenced by political relations with Beijing.

Because of the lack of administrative sta! throughout the British Empire following the end ofwar,65 the Botany and Forestry Department, which was the 2-year post-war precursor of the Ag-riculture and Fisheries Department (AFD), was sta!ed by non-experts, and as in other colonialpossessions, was influenced by the newly created administrative instrument of Development De-partments. In 1947 when the AFD was established, Dr. C. A. G. Herklots, an academic at theUniversity of Hong Kong, assumed the position of AFD Director after a stint as the Secretaryof Development from 1945 to 1947. Because a liberal governmentality is often dependent uponforging alliances with independent agents to successfully implement programs, the Roman Cath-olic Church functioned as an important institutional force in remaking the space of refugee veg-etable farmers.66 The Acting Superintendent of the Botany and Forestry Department during partof the critical post-war 1945e1947 period was the Jesuit and Irish Roman Catholic priest ThomasRyan. Because of his experience with refugees while in southern China, and his aggressive orga-nizational skills, in part because of the Jesuit tradition of cultivating relationships with the power-ful,67 Father Ryan was appointed to this position by the Colonial Secretary.68

The presence of religious organizations was always strong in pre-war Hong Kong, not only be-cause the colony functioned as a base for China missionary activities, but also because of the ab-sence of colonial welfare institutions in this laissez faire colony. This is certainly one reason whythe pastoral power of the Roman Catholic Church has been at the center of refugee welfare issuesin Hong Kong and elsewhere in the world, and in particular, the Jesuits whose vocational bio-pol-itics, or concern for the well being of a population, is often centered on education and social work.At the VMO, for example, Jesuit Father O’Dwyer was the ‘uno"cial adviser’ on cooperatives inthe early 1950s, and was sent to study cooperatives around the world at Vatican expense. In ad-dition, it was the Jesuits who were responsible for establishing adult education classes and a crecheat the VMO.69 The political dimension of the shepherd-flock model in Hong Kong cannot go un-noticed because while being diverse in nature, the Jesuits functioned as the shock troops of pas-toral power in challenging the spread of global communism,70 but simultaneously became agentsin a new imperial moral ethos, along with socialists in Britain, to temper the negative e!ects ofcapitalism.71


The VMO: a colonial project

While the AFD was responsible for all matters agricultural, its primary responsibilities werefocused on padi, fisheries and livestock. In addition, indigenous farmers or ‘old clients’ were givenpriority by the colonial District O"cers over the immigrant farmers who were newcomers.72

The systematic management of the New Territories vegetable economy, however, belonged tothe VMO, a marketing cooperative established in 1947 that became administratively part of theCo-operative and Marketing Department; by the early 1950s, the VMO had a sta! of 11 govern-ment servants, and up to 300 employees. The first Development O"cer attached to the VMO wasRobert Hart, who was a businessman in northern China before the war, and remained at theVMO until the early 1950s. The VMO was primarily responsible for the collection of vegetablesfrom farmers at various depots in the New Territories, transport of vegetables from these depotsto the Wholesale Vegetable Market in Kowloon, and the sale of produce to registered retailers.While receiving grants and loans from the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, the VMOwas a financially self-supporting institution primarily based on each farmer paying a 10% com-mission on the produce selling price.

Because vegetable marketing cooperatives were novel in the colonies, the colonial governmentdid not possess models or ‘regimes of practice’73 elsewhere in the tropical world to emulate. Whileon a trip to the Colonial O"ce in London immediately after the war, Herklots suggests a British-based model, one weighted with paternalistic and pastoral discourse:

[t]he cooperative movement has achieved its greatest success in the most civilized countries eScandinavia and Britain. In those countries, the movement was a bottom-up phenomenon,but in Hong Kong it must be the reverse e from the government to the better educated mem-bers of society down to the workers. The idea of a cooperative movement is something newto the Chinese and it is not easy to find honest and intelligent personnel who are capable ofgrasping its import and interpreting it in action.74

Uncovering the British genealogy of this ‘regime of practice’ is important to explain the estab-lishment of the VMO as a ‘laboratory of modernity’ because of common historical experience.75

The first agricultural cooperatives in Britain were for market gardeners around London in 1867;by 1914, there were 200 cooperatives with some 24,000 members.76 World War One hastened theestablishment of agricultural cooperatives, particularly those related to marketing because of thevulnerability of food supplies caused by increasing dependence on imports during the war.77 Withthe Agricultural Act of 1947, the pastoral-like goals of government policy were to establish a stableand e"cient food supply that would provide fair financial remuneration and decent living condi-tions for farmers.78 It is not coincidental that Hong Kong experienced similar food dependencyproblems during and immediately after World War Two as supplies from China were dramaticallyreduced and that similar pastoral-developmentalist arguments were posited by Hong Kong agri-cultural o"cials with regard to the economic and social welfare of their populations.

Constructing a VMO-centered vegetable economy in the New Territories required the margin-alization of a significant actor, that of urban middlemen or laan who before the war controlledmost facets of vegetable transport and marketing, as well as functioning as informal sources ofcredit to vegetable farmers.79 In his 1945 argument to the Colonial Secretary for the establishmentof the VMO, Father Ryan describes the laan in uncompromising terms; the laan system


constitutes a ‘racket’ and that the laan have ‘abused their position’.80 Anchored in the moralisticdiscourse of pastoral power, he describes the VMO and their associated cooperatives as ‘necessaryfor the public good’ destined to replace the system of laans that is ‘evil’.81 Such discourse reflectsthe prevailing Jesuit world view of an agricultural moral economy based upon ‘producer cooper-atives as a natural functioning system’ that would steer a course between capitalist individualismand socialist collectivism.82 Again, the genealogical sources were cooperative societies in GreatBritain where vegetable farmers were viewed as being too dependent on money lending middle-men.83 A pastoral power-based genealogy is also important because the champion of agriculturalcooperatives in Ireland was also a Jesuit Catholic priest.84

As a disciplinary colonial project, the VMO was an essential instrument of governmentality bywhich the modernization of agricultural production required the ‘creative destruction’ of per-ceived traditions such as the laan by an externally introduced modernity.85 Modern governmen-tality, however, does not require obedience from its citizens based on law to achieve itsmodernizing ambitions, but deploys tactics so that individuals, as the objects of transformation,might participate in a government project because of self-interest.86 During the early years, theVMO deployed certain practices in the forming and regulating of subjects to promote its modern-izing ambitions. For example, the police were authorized to stop all trucks transporting vegetablesthat did not possess a VMO issued permit.87 Leaflets advertising the benefits of the VMO weredropped from airplanes in 15 di!erent locations. The virtues of the VMO were broadcast frompublic address systems at all major marketing towns and balloons bearing slogans were flownover the major vegetable growing centers.88 Critically important was the establishment of 26di!erent marketing cooperatives established by the VMO from which vegetable farmers couldborrow money.89

Colonial memoranda rarely speak of the VMO’s shortcomings, although it was widely recog-nized outside of government that the VMO was not popular among a significant number of veg-etable farmers; indeed by the early 1960s, up to half of vegetable produce was sold to illegalwholesalers.90 Despite Father Ryan’s claims that ‘the farmers are not so unprogressive and stereo-typed in their views as is sometimes imagined’,91 vegetable farmers did not accept membership inthe marketing cooperatives without suspicion. Foucault recognized this dynamic in that resistanceis intrinsic in all power relationships.92 Reasons given for farmers being wary of the VMO werethe lack of freedom and not being knowledgeable of the ‘true activities of the market’.93 An ad-ditional and critically important perceived shortcoming was that even though the VMO o!eredhigher prices than the laan, non-members could sell to the cooperative and that farmers valuedthe flexibility of selling their produce to whomever they prefer.94 This last observation is symp-tomatic of Foucault’s heterotopias that were also associated with the ‘experimental spaces’ ofland settlement schemes in 1930s Britain.95 While the VMO a!orded a new economic order basedupon greater freedom from the laan, it was an alternative based on the contradiction of conser-vative liberalism because of its perceived top-down monopolistic and paternalistic nature. Indeed,all the VMOs rural district representatives ‘were chosen because in his district he is the most com-petent man and most acceptable to the main body of farmers’ rather than being elected by farmersof that district.96

As with land settlement schemes in Great Britain, political considerations connected to socio-economic reconstruction were crucial in the New Territories. The greatest source of perceivedthreat originated among a number of New Territories individuals claiming to represent vegetable


farmer’s interests who requested that the VMO’s monopoly over vegetable marketing be abol-ished or temporarily suspended. In every case, the response from either Herklots or Ryan wasthat these individuals are ‘agitators’ or ‘trouble makers’, often backed by disa!ected laan, inter-ested in destabilizing colonial rule, whether they be Communist or Kuomintang.97 Indeed, one‘agitator’ attempted to arouse the fears of colonial o"cials by claiming that the vegetable farmerswere so dissatisfied with the VMO that they would be ‘susceptible to Communist doctrines’.98 AsStoler99 has observed, however, perceived political motives were often harnessed by authoritiesthrough paternalistic discourse to portray peasants as weak and vulnerable, and thus requiring‘colonial’ protection. As Deery100 has shown with the Communist Emergency in late-colonial Ma-laya, the discourse of ‘trouble maker’ and ‘agitator’ was an attempt to delegitimize and criminalizeopponents, and thus masking real economic grievances by some of the laan and vegetable farmers.

Deepening experimental space and land tenure

The VMO possessed the full support of government decision makers because it was able to ac-complish the parallel goals of politically neutralizing a perceived threat that refugees posed to co-lonial rule, and provisioning the Crown Colony with the majority of its green vegetable needs.These same VMO actors such as Ryan and Hart also aggressively lobbied colonial decision mak-ers to deepen the New Territories as ‘experimental space’ by fundamentally changing systems ofland tenure. Another group of lower and mid-level government actors, who were not monolithicin nature, were equally aggressive in lobbying government not to entertain substantial changes inland tenure traditions. While land tenure reform promoted political loyalty among tenant vegeta-ble farmers, the political loyalty of land owning indigenous villagers was perceived by governmentdecision makers as being far more critical to stability and rule within the larger political context ofthe Cold War.

Questions of peasant land tenure were common throughout the British Empire, based uponprinciples of morality and agricultural productivity centered on individualized cultivation.101

New Territories tenant vegetable farmers were forced to pay 40e60% of their produce to ricegrowing landowners. Many absentee landowners leased land to other indigenous villagers whoin turn rented the land to vegetable farmers; these sub-tenants charged higher rents when com-pared to the principal landowner.102 When the vegetable farmer’s crop failed or productionwas below expected yields, they were still expected to pay a majority of the rent in cash.103

This exploitative situation was well known, as even an unknown government o"cial who didnot favor radical land reform states that ‘we have governed the New Territories by preservinga feudal system which, for so long has been the means of keeping thousands of our people, asthe district o"cer stated, in serfdom’.104 In a 1949 correspondence with the Colonial Secretary,after he had left government service, but was a member of the New Territories Development Com-mittee (NTDC), Ryan challenges the government from the moralistic shepherd-flock perspectiveby claiming that ‘so long as the people have to eke out their living under the tryranny [sic] of feu-dalistic landed gentry and corrupt bureaucrats, democracy can only, at best be windowdressing’.105

Those aggressively calling for land tenure issues to be addressed implicitly understood that po-litical rationalities might influence Government House decisions. The Hong Kong government


was intimately aware of land reform initiatives taking place just across the border in Guangdong.Capitalizing on this concern, Ryan reminds the government that ‘within the next few months theCommunists will be putting their land reform programme into operation on our border. It willcause discontent and envy amongst our farmers unless we equal it or o!er something better’.106

Dovetailing with Ryan’s observation, Hart claims that ‘now would be the ideal time to introducea program which would consolidate the New Territories population in such a way as to makeCommunist influence amongst them very di"cult’.107

Additional arguments for land reform are o!ered, and these possess a grander geopoliticalvision. In a confidential 1950 correspondence to the Colonial Secretary, Hart argues that

[w]e have in the New Territories a manageable area, a small population and a machinery ofgovernment capable, if expanded, a revolutionary programme which would, indeed, bea demonstration of British colonial administration. It could indeed be a proving groundnot only in China, but to the world, that our form of government can withstand Communistinfluences and rest on something more than military might.108

Herklots, the Secretary of Development and Hart’s immediate superior, chimed in by stating incorrespondence to the Colonial Secretary that the

Chinese visualize two possible forms of life. One is exemplified by the Kuomintang Party,which is democratic in name, and the other the Communists. I believe there is a thirdway, a truly democratic way which, if properly understood and properly interpreted, wouldsolve many of China’s problems and set her on the way to permanent happiness.109

This ‘revolutionary programme’ of Hart’s and the ‘third way’ of Dr. Herklots can be inter-preted as an attempt to more deeply construct geopolitical ‘experimental space’ that o!ered fur-ther opportunities for the government to target refugees as well as the New Territories agriculturaleconomy for transformation. The benefits of granting tenure rights to refugee vegetable farmersare much more than the transformation of bodies in localized space, however, because both Hartand Herklots discursively construct geographical imaginations that are global and regional inscale, respectively; the experimental discourses of ‘demonstration’, ‘proving ground’ and ‘thirdway’ are localized in nature, but inherently possess pastoral visions that are territoriallyuniversalistic.110

While those actors averse to substantial changes in land tenure policy were oftentimes sympa-thetic to the cause of land reform on moral grounds, their voices informed the government thatsuch potential changes in land tenure were not needed or warranted. Their dissenting voices wereprimarily in the institutional context of the New Territories Development Committee (NTDC),chaired by J. Barrow, the District Commissioner of the New Territories (DCNT), and establishedin 1947 by the Governor to advise the Colonial Secretary of Development policy issues. As anexpression of the new governmentality blending population and national wealth that requiredgreater coordination,111 its 10e13 members were a heterogeneous group of civil servants repre-senting various government departments, each of whom were actors possessing aspirations andactivities within this governmental network.112 Many NTDC members voiced their oppositionto land reform in memoranda to Government House in reaction to a single 1947 memorandumauthored by Father Ryan to the Secretary of the Colonies. Because ‘it is against the ideals thatdi"culties and failures of government are identified, measured and problematised’, Ryan suggests


that a Commission of Enquiry be established to better understand land tenure problems.113 Ryanbelieved in advance that the Commission’s outcome would be the ‘recommendation of compulsorysale of land to those working it’ and that ‘the mere suggestion of a legal forfeiture of land in thisway would have provoked a violent outcry a few years ago, but there is reason to believe that itwould be more readily accepted now, since landowners, must realize at least the danger of actionagainst them similar to that which is taking place in China’.114

The first category of dissent contesting Ryan’s request was based on the belief that tenancy wasnot a serious problem. From the Deputy Colonial Secretary comes the claim that ‘there is a ten-dency first on the part of Father Ryan, then by Mr. Robert Hart to exaggerate the extent of land-lordism and debt’.115 The colony’s Labor O"cer states ‘that while there might be instances of landbeing leased for rental in kind in the northern part of the New Territories, it is not commonenough to warrant the appointment of a special commission of inquiry’.116 The colony’s Land Of-ficer makes the additional claim that ‘tenant farmers would in fact not avail themselves of the ben-efits of such a scheme. They are not as a class ambitious and seldom put more into land than thebarest minimum required to provide a livelihood from them and their dependents’.117 DCNT Bar-row believed that a ‘50/50 split is not overbearing, and that remember, tenant farmers can earnadditional income. The primary needs are fertilizer, irrigation, and loans’.118 Paul Tsui, the singleChinese agricultural o"cer during the AFDs early years, suggests that providing some system ofrent control is a possibility, but the problem of working capital is the most important barrier fac-ing tenant farmers.119 Reflecting the general bias of the Agriculture and Fisheries Department fa-voring Punti rice farmers, Tsui dismisses substantial land reform measures because ‘[tenant]farmers are mainly outsiders’.120 This last statement is not surprising considering that Tsui’s fam-ily was from a Punti village.

The second category of dissent was anchored in the belief that substantial land reform was le-gally problematic. While a District O"cer in the New Territories refers to the present system as‘extortion’ he claims that Father Ryan’s proposal is a ‘direct attack on private property’.121 TheLand O"cer believes such a proposal is impractical because it is ‘directly at variance with funda-mental principles of property law’.122 Strangeways, a Senior Agricultural O"cer, is even moreforceful in his dissent by claiming that ‘[w]e can not launch forth on anything that smacks of So-viet ideals as this, I consider, shows weakness and an admission of past policy’.123

Land reform to benefit tenant vegetable farmers as envisioned by Ryan and Herklots never ma-terialized.124 Temporally paralleling the call for land reform, however, in part as a technical sub-stitute for land reform, was a push for conducting a social and economic survey of the NewTerritories that would include data on land use, local customs, farm practices, farm revenue,and of course tenancy levels. The post-World War Two origin for such an instrument is unknown,but a 1948 memoranda from Hart to the Deputy Colonial Secretary indicated that the financialcost of the survey was proposed under a Colonial Development and Welfare Fund allocation, butwas not funded. Hart claims, however, that a survey ‘is one of such fundamental importance tothe ultimate prosperity of the farmer that it might be approved in principle now’.125 The Chair ofthe Colonial Development and Welfare Committee makes a tangential, but equally forceful argu-ment by stating that to help farmers ‘we must have full knowledge of the conditions under whichhe lives and be ready to alleviate these conditions where they press hardly upon him’.126 He toobelieved that the survey would be funded through grants from the Colonial Welfare and Devel-opment O"ce.


While a social and economic survey was viewed by many in government as an instrument tolearn more about farming in the New Territories, they were hesitant to move forward for variousreasons. DCNT Barrow, for example, makes the argument that a survey is not needed becausepilot surveys were carried out and these yielded su"cient information. In response, Ryan re-sponded by claiming that these pilot surveys do not allow us ‘to even draw temporary conclu-sions’.127 Nevertheless, Barrow did entertain the idea of a survey as long as ‘experts trained inthe scientific objective approach’ were enlisted even if that meant enlisting local investigators. Bar-row suggested that Paul Tsui would be a ‘suitable person’ to carry out the survey because out-siders, if enlisted, ‘would be highly unlikely to elicit the correct answers from the farmers andfishermen of the New Territories, whose way of thinking would be alien to them’.128 Barrow high-lighted, in a paternalistic fashion, that Tsui was a suitable choice by virtue of ‘sitting at the feet’ ofthe eminent British colonial anthropologist Raymond Firth during the London portion of hisDevonshire course.129

Much like progress toward land tenure reform, the social and economic survey was not under-taken.130 In a memoranda to the Colonial Secretary, DCNT Barrow indicates that ‘[H]e sees nourgency to conduct a social and economic survey of the New Territories (a topic of great interestby some quarters)’. Barrow was in part wary of the survey because of its implicit connection toland reform; he states that ‘we seek knowledge for its own sake e the survey is not tied to ‘‘re-form’’’.131 Wariness over the survey was voiced from Government House as well. In 1950, AustinCoates, who was an assistant secretary to the Deputy Colonial Secretary, wrote to Barrow statingthat ‘he does not consider not taking a survey is much of a tragedy’.132 In a memorandum to theColonial Secretary in that same year, Coates writes that after discussions with Barrow that ‘it willnot be possible to organize a survey in the foreseeable future’ and ‘doubt[s] whether anything willbe done at all’.133 Similar reservations were voiced a few years later in 1953 when the United Na-tions High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) requested from the colonial government poten-tial names for UNHCR’s Hong Kong representative to conduct a formal survey of refugees.Governor Grantham believed that an American representative would be too politicized becauseof associations with the Nationalists, and a British representative appeared to be unacceptable be-cause the political value of the UNCHR survey would be lessened. Despite the Norwegian Ed-ward Hambro eventually being chosen, the government still was wary because ‘the wholeoperation is of some delicacy, since security and political considerations will easily arise if the sur-vey is not discretely and strictly managed’.134

Local and regional political contexts

The ultimate end of modern government is the management of its population, welfare, condi-tion, and its wealth, and this new political economy as a science and technique of government re-quires knowledge of the population as a datum.135 Transposed from metropolitan countries tocolonial possessions, data in the form of censuses were collected to construct an authoritative ac-count to manage subject peoples and normalize colonial rule.136 After all, empirical knowledgerelated to population that is precise and accurate is critical for formulating strategies and pro-grams to promote e"ciency and wealth.137 From a geographical perspective, enumeration ‘pro-vided the basis for its capacity to govern by defining and classifying spaces’ and ‘demarcating


frontiers’.138 In the New Territories, however, detailed population data beyond land registrationand censuses to produce income from taxes and quantify population distributions were virtuallynon-existent.139

The absence of land tenure reform and the unwillingness of colonial authorities to conduct a so-cial and economic survey can be explained by a local political economy that was contingent upona larger scale regional and global Cold War context. While the post-World War Two colonial gov-ernment implemented a substantial number of programs and practices that essentially introduceda much deeper political economy in the New Territories, this management rationale was ‘withinan already well established framework of rules and procedures’.140 As Chiu and Hung observed,while the colonial government introduced modernization into the New Territories after WorldWar Two, this ‘neo-indirect rule’ was dependent upon the cooperation of the rural elite and theirrural committees by granting them roles in colonial governance and distributing material benefitsto them.141 These rural leaders then became the partners or collaborators for the government’simplementation of disciplining policies in the New Territories. As Chun has pointed out with ref-erence to this rural elite/colonial state nexus, government policy systemized and rationalized cus-tom as part of ‘the state’s hegemonic and disciplinary designs’.142

It was under this illusion of custom, coupled with perceived political contingencies that the co-lonial state did not move forward in altering land tenure, nor did it implement a social and eco-nomic survey. The role of the DCNT is critical to understanding these issues because, it was hisresponsibility to coordinate development projects; and, being the chief political o"cer in the dis-trict, he possessed the greatest clout in influencing Government House policies. In response toRyan’s desire to discuss land reform in the NTDC’s meeting, for example, Barrow pointed outthat ‘this subject because of its political issues, is being treated confidentially by the government’and that moves toward land reform would ‘fan political flames’.143 The political flames of courserefer to the New Territories landlords, the same group upon which colonial rule depended. Againin response to Ryan’s proposal, any move toward confiscation of land ‘would, I think withouta doubt, set all the more influential Chinese in the New Territories against the government. Sinceat this time of political instability these big landowners are the government’s strongest supportersin the New Territories, because they have so much to lose, I am not in favor of legal confiscationof their land.’144 As a social and economic survey would implicitly, if not explicitly bring the issueof land tenure out in the open, the DCNT believed that only local expert investigators should con-duct the survey, otherwise involvement of unsuitable investigators might involve serious politicalrepercussions.145 After discussing the issue with the DCNT, Austin Coates states that the survey‘would prejudice the whole issue with the general public; and it is most important to the success ofthe survey that New Territories people should know nothing about it’.146 The success of the VMOdid not directly impact the power of rural landowners, but any movement toward reforming landtenure to benefit refugee vegetable tenant farmers of course would have.

Maintenance of the ‘status quo’ and an illusionary adherence to native custom, dovetailed wellwith the larger geopolitical circumstances of the Cold War era. Propaganda-based posturing bythe Nationalists and Communists could hypothetically engender political instability, particularlyin the New Territories where even the indigenous population had yet to develop a Hong Kongidentity, in part because colonial authorities never desired one for fear of nationalistic movementsleading to the possibility of self-government.147 Indeed, indigenous villagers believed that the co-lonial administration was illegitimate. The issue of self-government introduced larger scale


geopolitical problems because the Chinese government demanded that Hong Kong retain its co-lonial status and any move toward self-government might result in the liberation of the colony byBeijing.148 While little archival evidence supports the following larger scale geopolitical observa-tion, the lack of movement in reforming land tenure to favor individual holdings indirectly pro-motes an environment of self-government and thus violates Beijing’s demand that Hong Kongexperience ‘no change at all’ while under British rule.149

Summary and conclusions

The discontinuity of World War Two provided opportunities to transform Hong Kong’s colo-nial governance from one based on sovereignty to one of governmentality. While the post-war tideof colonial developmentalism logically required a transition to governmentality to manage the co-lony’s new agricultural economy, specific rationalities frustrated these goals of modernity overspace and population. As a result, the transformation from sovereignty to governmentality wasarrested with respect to both vegetable marketing and land tenure.

As a disciplinary colonial project, the VMO was part of a larger developmentalist packageto deliver modernity to New Territories refugee vegetable farmers through the establishment ofcooperatives and the elimination of the middlemen laan. This more rational design within thecontext of the morally-based ‘shepherd-flock’ model required a centralized and thus patriar-chal governmentality symptomatic of conservative liberalism associated with the formationof heterotopic space. The VMO did construct a new space of regulatory control, but becauseof the spatially centralizing function of its distribution networks, the genuine empowerment ofthe socially and economically marginalized refugee farmers did not materialize owing to flex-ibility constraints. While the colonial government did inject a wider and deeper set of pro-grams to influence conduct among the New Territories population, government control ofconduct simply assumed a new and di!erent form. Indeed, the transition from the laan tothe VMO distribution system entailed a shift from choice and flexibility to one of governmentmonopoly.

While modernity involves breaking down old forms of life and their replacement with condi-tions allowing new forms of life, the absence of significant land tenure reform also provides evi-dence of an incomplete shift from sovereignty to governmentality during the post-wardevelopmental period. While a perceived threat to colonial rule by Communism was shared byall actors engaged in the management of the transformation of both space and population inthe New Territories, land reform as the ‘third way’ of Herklots did not become part of the largerpackage of ‘experimental space’ by those actors comprising the strongest networks of disciplinarypower. Gregory’s observations on geographical imaginations150 and the notion of geographicalscale151 inform our understanding of why these divergent perspectives anchored their respectivemodalities of power. The rationalities of those actors stridently calling for land reform were an-chored in ‘geographies of imagination’ in the sense that Ryan and Hart imagined what was pos-sible within the somewhat utopian ‘shepherd-flock’ model of fairness, hope and care to replacewhat they perceived as morally objectionable. Their geographical imaginations were obviouslylocal, but simultaneously regional and global in scale as they believed the experimental spaceof land tenure could be adopted in China and the Third World, respectively.


In contrast, the rationalities of those actors arguing for the status quo were anchored in their‘imaginary geographies’, or in fact the ‘imagined communities’ of Anderson, based on the illusionof preserving tradition that favored indigenous farmers claims to village land and ideally dove-tailed with the situated political rationalities and the resulting spatial practices of the localCold War conflict in the New Territories.152 The preservation of tradition allowed colonial bu-reaucrats to continue indirect rule as a form of ‘decentralized despotism’ and simultaneously pro-viding political stability during the critical decades of the post-war period.153 These actors weregrounded at the local geographical scale as each represented governmental constituencies com-prising the power geometry network of the NTDC cognizant of the local political realities pre-venting radical changes in land tenure. The issue of granting land tenure to refugee farmerswas short-lived because much like peri-urban market gardening elsewhere in the world, it is a tran-sitory form of land use as village landowners in the 1960s began selling their land to residentialand industrial interests who gradually transformed the green vegetable spaces of the NewTerritories.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Alan Smart of the University of Calgary, Wing-Shing Tang of Hong KongBaptist University, Michael Hawkins of Ball State University, and James Hayes in Sydney, Aus-tralia for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also goes to the CIESFulbright Exchange Program for providing financial support during the author’s stay in HongKong as well as an Association of American Geographers Travel Grant to conduct archival re-search at the Public Records O"ce in London.

Notes

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113. W.S. Tang, The Foucauldian Concept of Governmentality and Spatial Practice: an Introductory Note, OccasionalPaper, Vol. 139, Hong Kong, 1997, 15.

114. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.115. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.116. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1), Land Tenure in the New Territories.117. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.118. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1).119. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393. The issue of working capital, credit or loans always surfaced as the greatest economic

problem facing tenant farmers by many those opposing greater attention to land tenure. This focus on creditfor tenant farmers was naturally favored because it was an easier alternative to the daunting bureaucratic respon-sibilities of granting land ownership to refugee vegetable farmers. But, there also existed a strong political agendaas well. Immediately after the war, and before credit and loan programs were o!ered by the VMO, the MainlandBank of China established branch operations in the colony and it was a concern that ‘‘capital would be made ofthe fact that it was the Chinese Government (for it is a national bank) that was helping the farmers and not theHong Kong government:’’HKRS 41, D&S 1/2075.

120. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.121. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1).122. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1).123. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.124. No government published land tenure statistics specifically isolating vegetable farmers as an enumeration category

were published. Approximately 50 percent of farmers in The 1961 Census of Population were categorized as beingtenant occupiers, but this included all categories of farmers.

125. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826.126. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826.127. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826.128. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826.129. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.130. By 1960 no survey had yet to be conducted. In that same year, the non-governmental New Territories Agricultural

Association was o!ered funds from the Asia Foundation to conduct a social and economic survey of New Terri-tories farming families HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (2), Land Tenure in the New Territories. It is not known whetherthis particular survey was ever carried out.

131. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (2).132. HKRS 126, D&S 1/1003 (1).133. HKRS 126, D&S 1/1003 (1).134. CO 1030/381, Problem of Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong.135. Foucault, On governmentality.136. B. Cohn, Colonialism and its Form of Knowledge, Princeton, 1966; B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflec-

tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, 1991.


137. W.S. Tang, The Foucauldian Concept of Governmentality and Spatial Practice: an Introductory Note, OccasionalPaper, Vol. 139, Hong Kong, 1997; N. Rose and P. Miller, Political power beyond the state: problematics of gov-ernment, British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992) 173e206.

138. A. Chun, Colonial ‘governmentality’ in transition: Hong Kong as imperial object and subject, Cultural Studies 12(2000) 430e461.

139. A. Chun, La terra trema: the crisis of kinship and community in the New Territories of Hong Kong before andafter ‘the great transformation’, Dialectical Anthropology 16 (1991) 309e329.

140. Chun, La terra trema, 320.141. S.W.K. Chiu and Ho-fung Hung, State building and rural stability, in: Tak-Wing Ngo (Ed.),Hong Kong’s History,

New York, 1999, 74e100.142. Chun, La terra trema, 435.143. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.144. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393.145. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1).146. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1).147. J. Darwin, Hong Kong in British decolonisation, in: J.M. Brown and R. Foot (Eds), Hong Kong’s Transitions,

1842e1997, Oxford, 1997, 16e33.148. CO 537/7668, Food Supply Position: Hong Kong.149. CO 537/7668.150. D. Gregory, Ideology, Science, and Human Geography, London, 1978.151. A. Latham, Retheorizing the scale of globalization: topologies, actor-networks, and cosmopolitanism, in:

A. Herod and M.W. Wright (Eds), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, Malden, 2002, 115e144;E. Swyngedouw, Restructuring citizenship, the re-scaling of the state, and the new authoritarianism: closing theBelgian mines,Urban Studies 33 (1996) 1499e1521; N. Smith, Homeless/global: scaling places, in: J. Bird, B. Curtis,T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Tickner (Eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, London,1993, 187e119.

152. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, 1991.153. M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, Princeton, 1995.


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