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6 An End to Subsistence Farming: Opening the Way for Urban Development and Country Parks This chapter takes the New Territories from the War’s end to the mid-1970s.1 I shall here focus attention on a most curious paradox. The essence of postwar government policy in the NT was assistance and improvement of services: spasmodic and unbalanced at first, but eventually continuous and uniform. Yet the object of these attentions, the village population, unprompted, was about to embark on a momentous change, nothing less than the abandonment of its traditional way of life, and in many cases of the countryside itself. Briefly stated here, this involved the demise of rice farming, a sharp reduction in the economic use of the hillsides, and a continuing, self-opting, evacuation of long-established upland villages. While in no way attributable to official policies for the rural sector, their effect was to greatly facilitate the implementation of the government’s development planning for the Colony by reducing the stronger opposition to development and modernization that otherwise might well have occurred; and indubitably, by making it possible to establish the Country Parks without friction in the 1970s. A BRAVE NEW WORLD BUT NOT QUITE At the end of the War, as in other war-ravaged colonies and captured territories, a British Military Administration governed Hong Kong until the resumption of civil government on 1 May 1946.2 There had been little option, as it would take time to re-assemble the Colony’s civil servants, many of whom had spent three years and eight months in internment or prisoner of war camps, to recruit replacements for wartime casualties and those who had retired, and to fill the additional posts created for new initiatives in government. Among the early changes was a decision to place district 72 The Great Difference administration in the New Territories under one District Officer, although as prewar there continued to be two administrative districts.3 It had been by no means certain that, after its liberation, Hong Kong would be allowed to continue as a British Colony.4 Also, winds of change had marked the early postwar years. The election of a Labour government at home, and the establishment of the United Nations Organization, had created a new-found concern for the condition of colonies.5 They brought benefits to Hong Kong and other places under British rule. A Colonial Development and Welfare Act was passed in the UK in 1945, and in Hong Kong (June 1946) a committee, comprising both official members and others “representative of all communities in the Colony”, was appointed, with six sub-committees to consider development and welfare planning in the fields of housing and town planning, port development, public health, natural resources, welfare and education.6 Chaired by the District Officer, a New Territories sub-committee of the Colony’s development and welfare committee was formed early in 1947. Many of its recommendations were incorporated in an important despatch to London sent later in the year.7 In 1954, a Rural Development Committee, also chaired by the (by now) District Commissioner, with official and unofficial membership, was established, to advise the government on all matters relating to NT development, in particular to the extension of agricultural credit and the preparation of Colonial Development and Welfare schemes.8 Before long, a wind of a different kind would blow on the Colony, this time from the Mainland, where the prospect of the successful ousting of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government by the triumphant Communists was exercising the minds of several members of the sub-committee. Fearful of what political change across the border might entail, they (specialist government officers and a few civilian members) pointed to the uneven land situation in the NT, where the native population owned practically everything and immigrant farmers had either to rent fields or open Crown land, and pressed the case for reforms of one kind or another. The debate is too detailed to enter into here, but it was an issue at the time.9 Suffice to say that senior administrators saw things differently and reform was not pursued.10 However, discussion inside the sub-committee, and official correspondence outside it, had revealed that detailed knowledge on these subjects was generally lacking, and even admitted,11 and as a result some useful surveys into land-ownership, land utilization, topography, and economic minerals were carried out, with help from the University of Hong Kong.12 Interestingly, some democratic impulses...

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