Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong (review)

Tim Choy begins his ethnographic journey through Hong Kong’s conservation groups in the heart of one of the country parks, where villagers are exercising their indigenous land rights to bulldoze a six-hectare tract of land in order to build a low-density housing complex and a golf course. Would Choy, at the risk of being seen as a meddling foreigner, side with the passionate environmentalists in their efforts to spare endangered animals’ habitats from the putting green? Or would he side with the villagers and their quaint traditions against the imperialist environmental activists, even though these may not amount to much more than a cynical land-grab to cash in on Hong Kong’s bellicose luxury real estate market?

What follows is an exquisite anthropological account of how recent environmental campaigns in Hong Kong resonate with social and political dilemmas surrounding its return to Chinese sovereignty. At the crux of these dilemmas is a preoccupation with the uniqueness of Hong Kong in relation to China and, more abstractly, principles of universalism and particularism.

Just as discussions were getting under way about the future of Hong Kong under Chinese sovereignty, so a “language of endangerment” mediated by a discourse on “threat” and “uniqueness” (dahksik, in Cantonese) fashioned Hong Kong’s various environmental campaigns. We learn, for example, of how the pink dolphin, unheard of by most Hong Kong residents prior to the 1990s, became a national mascot at gala ceremonies marking Hong Kong’s return to China, chosen as a celebrated species because it was unique to the territory. And how the Tai O fishing village, remembered by older residents as a squalid repository of squatter settlements during Hong Kong’s raggedy development, became a site of nostalgia and tourism countering attempts to reconstruct its stilted houses (built in a style similar to those found in Malaysia). Most delightfully of all, we learn that the naming of Hong Kong’s flora and fauna reflects the distinctiveness with which Hong Kong citizens see themselves in relation to their mainland counterparts; the awkwardly named Spiranthes Hongkongitis, a flower believed to be a “genetically and reproductively distinct species in its own right…similar but distinct from” (60) the Spiranthes Sinesis. Even more conveniently, the latter is thought by some botanists to be biologically the mother of the former—an obvious reference to China’s relationship with Hong Kong.

The conservation motif need not stop with the environment, as Choy acknowledges. Academic departments in some of Hong Kong’s Universities have sought to reclaim “Hong Kong studies” and made them a focus of their programs. The democractic movement is also a conservation movement of sorts; an effort to forestall Hong Kong’s economic and political absorption by China. To this I would add that there is more than a kernel of conservationism in claims made by politicians from the other end of the political spectrum; that Hong Kong’s resources will be depleted by migrants flooding over from the Mainland and, more recently, from other southeast Asian countries since Hong Kong’s courts have recently ruled that it is unconstitutional to deny the permanent right of abode to the 350,000 or so migrant domestic helpers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka.

Arguments for particularism, uniqueness, and specificity become more tricky, however, when it is time to call in experts to testify in environmental debates. Experts derive their authority from being both particular and universal. They want to argue for locally appropriate technologies and solutions to Hong Kong’s problems, while claiming to be internationally recognized and holding Hong Kong to international standards. It is here that Hong Kong citizens dig themselves into a hole that can, at times, be difficult to get out of. There is a fine line between particularism and parochialism—Hong Kong’s prosperity remains entangled with both China and the international community. After Hong Kong’s return to China, for instance, some schools rushed to adopt Cantonese over English...