Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 763e783

www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

Governmentality and power in politically contested space: refugee farming in Hong Kongs New Territories, 1945e1970
Christopher A. Airriess
Department of Geography, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, USA

Abstract A small proportion of Mainland Chinese refugee ows into British Hong Kong following the 1949 Communist Revolution in the Peoples Republic of China were vegetable farmers, who by the late 1960s engendered a vegetable revolution in New Territories agricultural space. Heterogeneous actors and their diering modalities of power in the late-colonial government possessed an active managerial role in this vegetable revolution anchored in issues of marketing and land tenure. While post-World War Two developmentalist ontologies help explain government intervention in the post-war agricultural economy, this research focuses primarily on the disciplinary techniques deployed within the governance rationalities of the early Cold War period to cultivate pro-government loyalties among a potentially proletarianized, trans-border refugee farming population perceived by colonial authorities as being susceptible to Communist inuence. As experimental space, marketing innovations were a qualied success, but progress in land reform failed because of the 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, is remarkable. It is absolutely amazing the way in which some of the Chinese peasants who come from Red China get on.1

E-mail address: cairries@bsu.edu 0305-7488/$ - see front matter 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.02.002

764

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

This excerpted 1959 quote from Dudley Stamp, Britains foremost applied rural land use geographer with substantial work experience in British colonial possessions, hints at the radical postWorld War Two transformation of New Territories agricultural space without much personal knowledge of the colonial government project that was instrumental in managing the construction of this productive peri-urban vegetable farming landscape. This vegetable revolution lasted some 30 years until the mid-1970s when industrial and residential development in the New Territories signaled the beginning of a long-term decline and abandonment of agricultural space.2 Most New Territories vegetable farmers were refugees from neighboring Guangdong Province and British colonial ocials perceived them as being problematic in the context of the Cold War geopolitics based upon their potential proletarian/tenant status. Because the international boundary as a tool to spatially delimit the contrasting political systems between the leased New Territories and China became far more rigid after World War Two, it is important to perceive the colonial project of modernizing agriculture as a package of techniques to manage both space and political identity on the colonys northern geographical margins. This research harnesses a Foucauldian perspective, particularly his later contributions on governmentality as developed by Dean3 and Rose and Miller4, to examine the rationalities of colonial practices and forms of state intervention that directly impacted the vegetable economy in 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 sovereignty and governmentality, followed by a description of the post-World War Two refugee population inux and vegetable producing economy as a foundational backdrop to analyze the techniques of late-colonial governmentality. The primary colonial project that transformed the states disciplinary power in shaping the conduct of the refugee farming population was the Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO). As a governmental technique expressive of pastoral power, the VMO is viewed as a qualied success because of its heterotopic and thus paternalistic foundations in the transformation of an objectied refugee population within the larger Cold War context. The same government actors responsible for the success of the VMO were, however, unable to fulll their geographical imaginations of the New Territories as experimental space to include greater land tenure rights for refugee tenant vegetable farmers. The rationale of those more powerful government actors blocking land reform rested on the illusion of preserving native custom which dovetailed with their spatial practices promoting political security in the Cold War context. Archival materials in the form of administrative memoranda are the primary source materials used to uncover the nature of colonial governance. In focusing upon the colonial states governance, in a sense adopting the view of the colonizers rather than those being disciplined, this methodology could be criticized for ignoring the peasantry6 by privileging the colonial states autobiography.7 While the nature of this present post-structuralist research perspective is most concerned with isolating the governance discourse of the colonial state which naturally includes these ctions that constitute situated or partial knowledge,8 there does exist a counter-archive of the subaltern colonized through deconstructing the discourse of the colonizers.9 Lastly, the use of colonial memoranda reinforces the notion that colonialism is not a monolithic endeavor because the documents reveal deep epistemological cleavages among colonial state actors concerning modalities of governmentality.10

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

765

Situating theoretical considerations The application of a Foucauldian perspective on political economy is well suited to examine the colonial governments management of refugee vegetable farmers because while this research does conceive a post-World War Two developmental liberalism as a driving force in reordering New Territories agricultural space, it also assumes, like Foucault, that theoretical materials must be laid over specic events and phenomena under study to ensure that the concepts deployed have not so much an a priori character.11 The Hong Kong context is indeed atypical; described as being an exception to ordinary rules12 and a political history [that] makes nonsense of the decolonising process,13 the Crown Colonys governors always possessed a large degree of decision making autonomy from London, and when compared to other dependencies, the Colonial Oce knew 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 dierent forms of heterotopias; one being crisis heterotopias and the other, heterotopias of deviance such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals or rest homes.16 Refugees would certainly be perceived as a deviant population because of their uprooted nature and their liminal national loyalties. Losing an attachment to place, refugees become objectied as being undierentiated raw material lacking a moral and political compass and thus threatening public safety and endangering political stability. The rationale of governmentality in the context of the Cold War and development goals resulted in refugees needing special therapeutic interventions because of their pathological condition caused by spatial displacement.17 While agricultural cooperatives in general are institutions of alternate social ordering because they are government constructed emplacement projects to revolutionize the existing spatial pattern of how agricultural goods are produced and distributed, the VMOs heterotopic nature is amplied because its membership is primarily composed of refugees.18 Another avenue in which Foucault informs our knowledge of the way the colonial government managed the vegetable revolution and refugee population in the New Territories is through his notions of government mentalities and modalities of power, specically applied to the 20th century welfare state.19 The rst modality of power is based on the cities and citizens governmentality model in which the state harnesses its disciplinary techniques to manage an orderly and subject population anchored in a legal and political structure based on equality within a political community. This is contrasted with a church-based pastoral power anchored in moral and ethical ties forming social solidarity in the shepherd-ock model. With governments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries realizing that political rationalities must also include social dimensions, public institutions could no longer achieve order and security through law, but account for the social domain as well.20 Foucault explores the genealogy of how pastoral power was incorporated into a more modern state governmentality.21 There emerged, however, an inherent disjunction between the application of these two modalities of power, particularly with reference to governmentality and social justice.22 These modalities of power schema contrasting pastoral power and governmentality are ideally suited for examining the vegetable revolution in the New Territories because agents of the Roman Catholic Church were instrumental in the VMOs formation and were at the forefront, albeit unsuccessful, in the eort to persuade agents in the colonial

766

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

government to alter land tenure traditions based on the rationale of social justice in contrast to colonial 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 dierent colonial rationality with its attendant congurations of power associated with the transition from sovereignty to governmentality, and from a conception of the state as territory to one of economy.23 Ten years before the Japanese invasion, the New Territories accounted for 13% of the Crown Colonys population of 774,501,24 but 82% of land space. Agriculture in pre-World War Two period was based almost exclusively on a two crop padi rice culture, coupled with a handful of secondary crops and vegetables for home consumption with some sold in nearby village markets.25 Vegetable production did increase dramatically by the late 1930s as vegetable farmers comprised 21% of the New Territories population26 and supplied approximately 20% of the vegetables consumed in the colony27 in response to the late 1930s immigration of Guangdong vegetable agriculturalists south in advance of the Japanese invasion of South China.28 Government inattention to agricultural matters was a priori evident because unlike most British colonies that possessed an administratively distinct Agricultural Department by the 1940s, this change did not come to Hong Kong until after the war; indeed, Hong Kong was the last colonial possession in the British Empire to initiate such bureaucratic change.29 A 1938 request by Superintendent Flippance of the Botanical and Forestry Department to Government House for the formation of an Agricultural Department was turned down because of the nancial cost.30 The Superintendents memorandum possessed a pastoral power discourse as he claims with reference to Hong Kong that the lack of balance between agriculture and trade is now universally recognized as a modern evil to be redressed.31 Such an argument mirrors a moral-based governmentality characteristic in Britain during the inter-war years.32 While these metropolitan-based governmentality arguments resulted in state intervention during the 1930s in other colonial possessions,33 little action transpired in Hong Kong in part because its civil service was perceived as particularly lethargic, parochial, and Mandarinized.34 Small eorts, however, were taken to improve the colonys pre-war agricultural economy. Four separate pre-war economic commissions addressed issues relating to vegetable production, agricultural indebtedness35 and the establishment of agricultural cooperatives.36 Because the pre-World War Two raison d etre of the colony was anchored in trade and industry, government mentalities did not include agricultural development. Occupied by Punti and Hakka landlords, the primary concern of colonial authorities in the New Territories was to keep order and promote peaceful conditions under the model of sovereignty.37 While such traditional politico-economic descriptions naturally point to a system of indirect rule based on local custom, Chun contests 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 through the collection of taxes and the creation of new tenure laws based on modifying Chinese custom.38 While Chuns observation is correct, these state functions are only a thin veneer of a deepening of governmentality following World War Two. Applied in a general way, Giddens39 describes this transformation as an important shift in relations between the scope and intensity of rule. In no

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

767

sense could we describe the pre-war colonial government as one of governmentality whereby populations were disciplined through a multitude of programs for the direction of conduct.40 Objects of discipline: the refugee inux During the Japanese occupation of World War Two, the Crown Colonys population decreased substantially from 1,639,337 in 1941 to 650,000 in 1945. By 1951, the population reached two million based largely upon the ow of refugees from densely populated and neighboring Guangdong Province, the traditional source region of Hong Kong immigrants. In part because of these refugee ows, the population of the New Territories increased to 200,000 in 1951 and by 1961, approximately 44% of the New Territories population were refugees.41 Economic conditions were a 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 common economic reasons for rural refugees entering Hong Kong were shortages of fertilizer, insucient food rations, and lack of opportunities to cultivate private plots.43 By 1961 almost 70% of the 16,414 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 transborder sub-districts, for example, 61% of total agricultural acreage was cultivated by tenants and approximately half the total acreage was under vegetable cultivation in the early 1950s; acreage dedicated to vegetables expanded substantially throughout the 1960s (Fig. 1). Even in Tsuen Wan, a soon to be industrial node in the southwestern New Territories, 72% of total acreage was under vegetable cultivation, and 40% of cultivators were outsiders.45 Refugee vegetable farmers rented land from agnatic landowners which were increasingly being freed up for refugee vegetable production because of out migration to seek nearby urban-based wage employment. Indigenous villagers were reluctant to sell their land to vegetable growing immigrants because easy prot could be made from renting land to tenant farmers rather than growing rice, of rapidly rising land values as the New Territories became more urbanized, and of the symbolic capital of owning land associated with lineage ideology.46 Without land or house ownership, refugee tenant farmers were non-citizens in these villages, and thus were socially and politically marginalized and not recognized as part of the village community.47 Vegetable production increased dramatically to meet the needs of the burgeoning urban population. Between 1953 and 1975, vegetable cultivation as a percentage of the total stock of land in agriculture experienced an almost eight fold increase, paralleled by a decrease in paddy rice from 70 to 9% of total land in agriculture. As a result, the Crown Colonys level of vegetable self-suciency increased from 20% in the late 1930s to 60% in 1956, and 75% by 1961. While the tenant vegetable farmers rented abandoned padi land for cultivation, a signicant amount of padi land was simply left fallow. In 1953, unused land comprised 8.1% of agricultural space, but by 1975 increased to 29%. Transforming the post-war episteme of government The establishment of the VMO as an interventionist colonial project intersected with the shift of a larger colonial mentality in the management of subject peoples. The pre-war sovereignty

768

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

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.

rationality of favoring administration and law rather than education and public health changed as the mentality of the British Labor government toward developing their colonial possessions witnessed a sea change, one that entailed a rediscovery of the territory for Britain.48 The poor and marginalized colonial populations thus became objects of knowledge and management which required constructive government intervention through the larger rationale of development49 based on governmentality in which a more benevolent colonial government devised the rules of authority so that development could be carefully planned and carefully controlled.50 This new rationality was based upon an imperial moral order51 that promoted good government not as an overarching philosophy or principle,52 but as a collection of political attitudes among those in power using Britain as a normative reference.53 As a result, a new conduct of relationships54 emerged in which a governmental rationality sought to produce eects of power in the self-regulating eld of the social,55 which in turn engendered the reconstruction of colonial space,56 and the subsequent centralization of colonial power to produce empowerment or self-determination among colonial subjects.

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

769

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 in 1945, 1949 and 1950, that dispersed monies to the colonies in the form of both loans and grants58; signicant funds were dedicated to agricultural, forestry, and veterinarian services.59 Indeed, part of this new mentality was the creation of the Colonial Agricultural Service in 1935 dedicated to the more ecient production of food crops in colonial possessions60 so that peasant producers might be able to live in healthy, contented and prosperous communities.61 Also included in this new colonial economic mentality was the cooperative marketing of agricultural food products.62 Development planning in post-war Hong Kong, however, was embedded in the construction of Cold War politics. The colonial government was concerned that the colony not be used as a stage for Communist and Nationalist ideological battles and thus threatening the stability of colonial rule. More important was the parallel concern that Communist political activity might cause unrest among the ballooning refugee population and thus promote problems associated with irredentism.63 Indeed, as Smart64 rightly claims with reference to squatters and the origins of the colonial governments public housing program in Hong Kongs urban space, the nature of government intervention was inuenced by political relations with Beijing. Because of the lack of administrative sta throughout the British Empire following the end of war,65 the Botany and Forestry Department, which was the 2-year post-war precursor of the Agriculture and Fisheries Department (AFD), was staed by non-experts, and as in other colonial possessions, was inuenced by the newly created administrative instrument of Development Departments. In 1947 when the AFD was established, Dr. C. A. G. Herklots, an academic at the University of Hong Kong, assumed the position of AFD Director after a stint as the Secretary of Development from 1945 to 1947. Because a liberal governmentality is often dependent upon forging alliances with independent agents to successfully implement programs, the Roman Catholic Church functioned as an important institutional force in remaking the space of refugee vegetable farmers.66 The Acting Superintendent of the Botany and Forestry Department during part of the critical post-war 1945e1947 period was the Jesuit and Irish Roman Catholic priest Thomas Ryan. Because of his experience with refugees while in southern China, and his aggressive organizational skills, in part because of the Jesuit tradition of cultivating relationships with the powerful,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 because the colony functioned as a base for China missionary activities, but also because of the absence of colonial welfare institutions in this laissez faire colony. This is certainly one reason why the pastoral power of the Roman Catholic Church has been at the center of refugee welfare issues in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the world, and in particular, the Jesuits whose vocational bio-politics, or concern for the well being of a population, is often centered on education and social work. At the VMO, for example, Jesuit Father ODwyer was the unocial adviser on cooperatives in the 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 creche at the VMO.69 The political dimension of the shepherd-ock model in Hong Kong cannot go unnoticed because while being diverse in nature, the Jesuits functioned as the shock troops of pastoral power in challenging the spread of global communism,70 but simultaneously became agents in a new imperial moral ethos, along with socialists in Britain, to temper the negative eects of capitalism.71

770

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

The VMO: a colonial project While the AFD was responsible for all matters agricultural, its primary responsibilities were focused on padi, sheries and livestock. In addition, indigenous farmers or old clients were given priority by the colonial District Ocers over the immigrant farmers who were newcomers.72 The systematic management of the New Territories vegetable economy, however, belonged to the VMO, a marketing cooperative established in 1947 that became administratively part of the Co-operative and Marketing Department; by the early 1950s, the VMO had a sta of 11 government servants, and up to 300 employees. The rst Development Ocer attached to the VMO was Robert Hart, who was a businessman in northern China before the war, and remained at the VMO until the early 1950s. The VMO was primarily responsible for the collection of vegetables from farmers at various depots in the New Territories, transport of vegetables from these depots to 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 VMO was a nancially self-supporting institution primarily based on each farmer paying a 10% commission on the produce selling price. Because vegetable marketing cooperatives were novel in the colonies, the colonial government did not possess models or regimes of practice73 elsewhere in the tropical world to emulate. While on a trip to the Colonial Oce in London immediately after the war, Herklots suggests a Britishbased model, one weighted with paternalistic and pastoral discourse: [t]he cooperative movement has achieved its greatest success in the most civilized countries e Scandinavia 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 members of society down to the workers. The idea of a cooperative movement is something new to the Chinese and it is not easy to nd honest and intelligent personnel who are capable of grasping its import and interpreting it in action.74 Uncovering the British genealogy of this regime of practice is important to explain the establishment of the VMO as a laboratory of modernity because of common historical experience.75 The rst 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 the establishment of agricultural cooperatives, particularly those related to marketing because of the vulnerability of food supplies caused by increasing dependence on imports during the war.77 With the Agricultural Act of 1947, the pastoral-like goals of government policy were to establish a stable and ecient food supply that would provide fair nancial remuneration and decent living conditions for farmers.78 It is not coincidental that Hong Kong experienced similar food dependency problems during and immediately after World War Two as supplies from China were dramatically reduced and that similar pastoral-developmentalist arguments were posited by Hong Kong agricultural ocials with regard to the economic and social welfare of their populations. Constructing a VMO-centered vegetable economy in the New Territories required the marginalization of a signicant actor, that of urban middlemen or laan who before the war controlled most facets of vegetable transport and marketing, as well as functioning as informal sources of credit to vegetable farmers.79 In his 1945 argument to the Colonial Secretary for the establishment of the VMO, Father Ryan describes the laan in uncompromising terms; the laan system

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

771

constitutes a racket and that the laan have abused their position.80 Anchored in the moralistic discourse of pastoral power, he describes the VMO and their associated cooperatives as necessary for the public good destined to replace the system of laans that is evil.81 Such discourse reects the prevailing Jesuit world view of an agricultural moral economy based upon producer cooperatives as a natural functioning system that would steer a course between capitalist individualism and socialist collectivism.82 Again, the genealogical sources were cooperative societies in Great Britain where vegetable farmers were viewed as being too dependent on money lending middlemen.83 A pastoral power-based genealogy is also important because the champion of agricultural cooperatives in Ireland was also a Jesuit Catholic priest.84 As a disciplinary colonial project, the VMO was an essential instrument of governmentality by which the modernization of agricultural production required the creative destruction of perceived traditions such as the laan by an externally introduced modernity.85 Modern governmentality, however, does not require obedience from its citizens based on law to achieve its modernizing 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, the VMO deployed certain practices in the forming and regulating of subjects to promote its modernizing ambitions. For example, the police were authorized to stop all trucks transporting vegetables that did not possess a VMO issued permit.87 Leaets advertising the benets of the VMO were dropped from airplanes in 15 dierent locations. The virtues of the VMO were broadcast from public address systems at all major marketing towns and balloons bearing slogans were own over the major vegetable growing centers.88 Critically important was the establishment of 26 dierent marketing cooperatives established by the VMO from which vegetable farmers could borrow money.89 Colonial memoranda rarely speak of the VMOs shortcomings, although it was widely recognized outside of government that the VMO was not popular among a signicant number of vegetable farmers; indeed by the early 1960s, up to half of vegetable produce was sold to illegal wholesalers.90 Despite Father Ryans claims that the farmers are not so unprogressive and stereotyped in their views as is sometimes imagined,91 vegetable farmers did not accept membership in the marketing cooperatives without suspicion. Foucault recognized this dynamic in that resistance is intrinsic in all power relationships.92 Reasons given for farmers being wary of the VMO were the lack of freedom and not being knowledgeable of the true activities of the market.93 An additional and critically important perceived shortcoming was that even though the VMO oered higher prices than the laan, non-members could sell to the cooperative and that farmers valued the exibility of selling their produce to whomever they prefer.94 This last observation is symptomatic of Foucaults heterotopias that were also associated with the experimental spaces of land settlement schemes in 1930s Britain.95 While the VMO aorded a new economic order based upon greater freedom from the laan, it was an alternative based on the contradiction of conservative 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 competent man and most acceptable to the main body of farmers rather than being elected by farmers of that district.96 As with land settlement schemes in Great Britain, political considerations connected to socioeconomic reconstruction were crucial in the New Territories. The greatest source of perceived threat originated among a number of New Territories individuals claiming to represent vegetable

772

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

farmers interests who requested that the VMOs monopoly over vegetable marketing be abolished or temporarily suspended. In every case, the response from either Herklots or Ryan was that these individuals are agitators or trouble makers, often backed by disaected laan, interested in destabilizing colonial rule, whether they be Communist or Kuomintang.97 Indeed, one agitator attempted to arouse the fears of colonial ocials by claiming that the vegetable farmers were so dissatised with the VMO that they would be susceptible to Communist doctrines.98 As Stoler99 has observed, however, perceived political motives were often harnessed by authorities through 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 Malaya, the discourse of trouble maker and agitator was an attempt to delegitimize and criminalize opponents, 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 accomplish the parallel goals of politically neutralizing a perceived threat that refugees posed to colonial 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 makers to deepen the New Territories as experimental space by fundamentally changing systems of land tenure. Another group of lower and mid-level government actors, who were not monolithic in nature, were equally aggressive in lobbying government not to entertain substantial changes in land tenure traditions. While land tenure reform promoted political loyalty among tenant vegetable farmers, the political loyalty of land owning indigenous villagers was perceived by government decision makers as being far more critical to stability and rule within the larger political context of the Cold War. Questions of peasant land tenure were common throughout the British Empire, based upon principles of morality and agricultural productivity centered on individualized cultivation.101 New Territories tenant vegetable farmers were forced to pay 40e60% of their produce to rice growing landowners. Many absentee landowners leased land to other indigenous villagers who in turn rented the land to vegetable farmers; these sub-tenants charged higher rents when compared to the principal landowner.102 When the vegetable farmers crop failed or production was 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 ocial who did not favor radical land reform states that we have governed the New Territories by preserving a feudal system which, for so long has been the means of keeping thousands of our people, as the district ocer 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 Committee (NTDC), Ryan challenges the government from the moralistic shepherd-ock perspective by claiming that so long as the people have to eke out their living under the tryranny [sic] of feudalistic landed gentry and corrupt bureaucrats, democracy can only, at best be window dressing.105 Those aggressively calling for land tenure issues to be addressed implicitly understood that political rationalities might inuence Government House decisions. The Hong Kong government

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

773

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 the Communists will be putting their land reform programme into operation on our border. It will cause discontent and envy amongst our farmers unless we equal it or oer something better.106 Dovetailing with Ryans observation, Hart claims that now would be the ideal time to introduce a program which would consolidate the New Territories population in such a way as to make Communist inuence amongst them very dicult.107 Additional arguments for land reform are oered, and these possess a grander geopolitical vision. In a condential 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 of government capable, if expanded, a revolutionary programme which would, indeed, be a demonstration of British colonial administration. It could indeed be a proving ground not only in China, but to the world, that our form of government can withstand Communist inuences and rest on something more than military might.108 Herklots, the Secretary of Development and Harts immediate superior, chimed in by stating in correspondence to the Colonial Secretary that the Chinese visualize two possible forms of life. One is exemplied by the Kuomintang Party, which is democratic in name, and the other the Communists. I believe there is a third way, a truly democratic way which, if properly understood and properly interpreted, would solve many of Chinas problems and set her on the way to permanent happiness.109 This revolutionary programme of Harts and the third way of Dr. Herklots can be interpreted as an attempt to more deeply construct geopolitical experimental space that oered further opportunities for the government to target refugees as well as the New Territories agricultural economy for transformation. The benets of granting tenure rights to refugee vegetable farmers are much more than the transformation of bodies in localized space, however, because both Hart and Herklots discursively construct geographical imaginations that are global and regional in scale, respectively; the experimental discourses of demonstration, proving ground and third way are localized in nature, but inherently possess pastoral visions that are territorially universalistic.110 While those actors averse to substantial changes in land tenure policy were oftentimes sympathetic to the cause of land reform on moral grounds, their voices informed the government that such potential changes in land tenure were not needed or warranted. Their dissenting voices were primarily in the institutional context of the New Territories Development Committee (NTDC), chaired by J. Barrow, the District Commissioner of the New Territories (DCNT), and established in 1947 by the Governor to advise the Colonial Secretary of Development policy issues. As an expression of the new governmentality blending population and national wealth that required greater coordination,111 its 10e13 members were a heterogeneous group of civil servants representing various government departments, each of whom were actors possessing aspirations and activities within this governmental network.112 Many NTDC members voiced their opposition to land reform in memoranda to Government House in reaction to a single 1947 memorandum authored by Father Ryan to the Secretary of the Colonies. Because it is against the ideals that diculties and failures of government are identied, measured and problematised, Ryan suggests

774

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

that a Commission of Enquiry be established to better understand land tenure problems.113 Ryan believed in advance that the Commissions outcome would be the recommendation of compulsory sale of land to those working it and that the mere suggestion of a legal forfeiture of land in this way would have provoked a violent outcry a few years ago, but there is reason to believe that it would be more readily accepted now, since landowners, must realize at least the danger of action against them similar to that which is taking place in China.114 The rst category of dissent contesting Ryans request was based on the belief that tenancy was not a serious problem. From the Deputy Colonial Secretary comes the claim that there is a tendency rst on the part of Father Ryan, then by Mr. Robert Hart to exaggerate the extent of landlordism and debt.115 The colonys Labor Ocer states that while there might be instances of land being leased for rental in kind in the northern part of the New Territories, it is not common enough to warrant the appointment of a special commission of inquiry.116 The colonys Land Ofcer makes the additional claim that tenant farmers would in fact not avail themselves of the benets of such a scheme. They are not as a class ambitious and seldom put more into land than the barest minimum required to provide a livelihood from them and their dependents.117 DCNT Barrow believed that a 50/50 split is not overbearing, and that remember, tenant farmers can earn additional income. The primary needs are fertilizer, irrigation, and loans.118 Paul Tsui, the single Chinese agricultural ocer during the AFDs early years, suggests that providing some system of rent control is a possibility, but the problem of working capital is the most important barrier facing tenant farmers.119 Reecting the general bias of the Agriculture and Fisheries Department favoring Punti rice farmers, Tsui dismisses substantial land reform measures because [tenant] farmers are mainly outsiders.120 This last statement is not surprising considering that Tsuis family was from a Punti village. The second category of dissent was anchored in the belief that substantial land reform was legally problematic. While a District Ocer in the New Territories refers to the present system as extortion he claims that Father Ryans proposal is a direct attack on private property.121 The Land Ocer believes such a proposal is impractical because it is directly at variance with fundamental principles of property law.122 Strangeways, a Senior Agricultural Ocer, is even more forceful in his dissent by claiming that [w]e can not launch forth on anything that smacks of Soviet ideals as this, I consider, shows weakness and an admission of past policy.123 Land reform to benet tenant vegetable farmers as envisioned by Ryan and Herklots never materialized.124 Temporally paralleling the call for land reform, however, in part as a technical substitute for land reform, was a push for conducting a social and economic survey of the New Territories 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 nancial cost of the survey was proposed under a Colonial Development and Welfare Fund allocation, but was not funded. Hart claims, however, that a survey is one of such fundamental importance to the ultimate prosperity of the farmer that it might be approved in principle now.125 The Chair of the Colonial Development and Welfare Committee makes a tangential, but equally forceful argument by stating that to help farmers we must have full knowledge of the conditions under which he lives and be ready to alleviate these conditions where they press hardly upon him.126 He too believed that the survey would be funded through grants from the Colonial Welfare and Development Oce.

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

775

While a social and economic survey was viewed by many in government as an instrument to learn more about farming in the New Territories, they were hesitant to move forward for various reasons. DCNT Barrow, for example, makes the argument that a survey is not needed because pilot surveys were carried out and these yielded sucient information. In response, Ryan responded by claiming that these pilot surveys do not allow us to even draw temporary conclusions.127 Nevertheless, Barrow did entertain the idea of a survey as long as experts trained in the scientic objective approach were enlisted even if that meant enlisting local investigators. Barrow suggested that Paul Tsui would be a suitable person to carry out the survey because outsiders, if enlisted, would be highly unlikely to elicit the correct answers from the farmers and shermen of the New Territories, whose way of thinking would be alien to them.128 Barrow highlighted, in a paternalistic fashion, that Tsui was a suitable choice by virtue of sitting at the feet of the eminent British colonial anthropologist Raymond Firth during the London portion of his Devonshire course.129 Much like progress toward land tenure reform, the social and economic survey was not undertaken.130 In a memoranda to the Colonial Secretary, DCNT Barrow indicates that [H]e sees no urgency to conduct a social and economic survey of the New Territories (a topic of great interest by some quarters). Barrow was in part wary of the survey because of its implicit connection to land reform; he states that we seek knowledge for its own sake e the survey is not tied to reform.131 Wariness over the survey was voiced from Government House as well. In 1950, Austin Coates, who was an assistant secretary to the Deputy Colonial Secretary, wrote to Barrow stating that he does not consider not taking a survey is much of a tragedy.132 In a memorandum to the Colonial Secretary in that same year, Coates writes that after discussions with Barrow that it will not be possible to organize a survey in the foreseeable future and doubt[s] whether anything will be done at all.133 Similar reservations were voiced a few years later in 1953 when the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) requested from the colonial government potential names for UNHCRs Hong Kong representative to conduct a formal survey of refugees. Governor Grantham believed that an American representative would be too politicized because of associations with the Nationalists, and a British representative appeared to be unacceptable because the political value of the UNCHR survey would be lessened. Despite the Norwegian Edward Hambro eventually being chosen, the government still was wary because the whole operation is of some delicacy, since security and political considerations will easily arise if the survey 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, condition, and its wealth, and this new political economy as a science and technique of government requires knowledge of the population as a datum.135 Transposed from metropolitan countries to colonial possessions, data in the form of censuses were collected to construct an authoritative account to manage subject peoples and normalize colonial rule.136 After all, empirical knowledge related to population that is precise and accurate is critical for formulating strategies and programs to promote eciency and wealth.137 From a geographical perspective, enumeration provided the basis for its capacity to govern by dening and classifying spaces and demarcating

776

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

frontiers.138 In the New Territories, however, detailed population data beyond land registration and censuses to produce income from taxes and quantify population distributions were virtually non-existent.139 The absence of land tenure reform and the unwillingness of colonial authorities to conduct a social and economic survey can be explained by a local political economy that was contingent upon a larger scale regional and global Cold War context. While the post-World War Two colonial government implemented a substantial number of programs and practices that essentially introduced a much deeper political economy in the New Territories, this management rationale was within an 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 World War Two, this neo-indirect rule was dependent upon the cooperation of the rural elite and their rural committees by granting them roles in colonial governance and distributing material benets to them.141 These rural leaders then became the partners or collaborators for the governments implementation of disciplining policies in the New Territories. As Chun has pointed out with reference to this rural elite/colonial state nexus, government policy systemized and rationalized custom as part of the states hegemonic and disciplinary designs.142 It was under this illusion of custom, coupled with perceived political contingencies that the colonial state did not move forward in altering land tenure, nor did it implement a social and economic survey. The role of the DCNT is critical to understanding these issues because, it was his responsibility to coordinate development projects; and, being the chief political ocer in the district, he possessed the greatest clout in inuencing Government House policies. In response to Ryans desire to discuss land reform in the NTDCs meeting, for example, Barrow pointed out that this subject because of its political issues, is being treated condentially by the government and that moves toward land reform would fan political ames.143 The political ames of course refer to the New Territories landlords, the same group upon which colonial rule depended. Again in response to Ryans proposal, any move toward conscation of land would, I think without a doubt, set all the more inuential Chinese in the New Territories against the government. Since at this time of political instability these big landowners are the governments strongest supporters in the New Territories, because they have so much to lose, I am not in favor of legal conscation of their land.144 As a social and economic survey would implicitly, if not explicitly bring the issue of land tenure out in the open, the DCNT believed that only local expert investigators should conduct the survey, otherwise involvement of unsuitable investigators might involve serious political repercussions.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 of the survey that New Territories people should know nothing about it.146 The success of the VMO did not directly impact the power of rural landowners, but any movement toward reforming land tenure to benet refugee vegetable tenant farmers of course would have. Maintenance of the status quo and an illusionary adherence to native custom, dovetailed well with the larger geopolitical circumstances of the Cold War era. Propaganda-based posturing by the Nationalists and Communists could hypothetically engender political instability, particularly in the New Territories where even the indigenous population had yet to develop a Hong Kong identity, in part because colonial authorities never desired one for fear of nationalistic movements leading to the possibility of self-government.147 Indeed, indigenous villagers believed that the colonial administration was illegitimate. The issue of self-government introduced larger scale

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

777

geopolitical problems because the Chinese government demanded that Hong Kong retain its colonial status and any move toward self-government might result in the liberation of the colony by Beijing.148 While little archival evidence supports the following larger scale geopolitical observation, the lack of movement in reforming land tenure to favor individual holdings indirectly promotes an environment of self-government and thus violates Beijings demand that Hong Kong experience no change at all while under British rule.149

Summary and conclusions The discontinuity of World War Two provided opportunities to transform Hong Kongs colonial governance from one based on sovereignty to one of governmentality. While the post-war tide of colonial developmentalism logically required a transition to governmentality to manage the colonys new agricultural economy, specic rationalities frustrated these goals of modernity over space and population. As a result, the transformation from sovereignty to governmentality was arrested with respect to both vegetable marketing and land tenure. As a disciplinary colonial project, the VMO was part of a larger developmentalist package to deliver modernity to New Territories refugee vegetable farmers through the establishment of cooperatives and the elimination of the middlemen laan. This more rational design within the context of the morally-based shepherd-ock model required a centralized and thus patriarchal governmentality symptomatic of conservative liberalism associated with the formation of heterotopic space. The VMO did construct a new space of regulatory control, but because of the spatially centralizing function of its distribution networks, the genuine empowerment of the socially and economically marginalized refugee farmers did not materialize owing to exibility constraints. While the colonial government did inject a wider and deeper set of programs to inuence conduct among the New Territories population, government control of conduct simply assumed a new and dierent form. Indeed, the transition from the laan to the VMO distribution system entailed a shift from choice and exibility to one of government monopoly. While modernity involves breaking down old forms of life and their replacement with conditions allowing new forms of life, the absence of signicant land tenure reform also provides evidence of an incomplete shift from sovereignty to governmentality during the post-war developmental period. While a perceived threat to colonial rule by Communism was shared by all actors engaged in the management of the transformation of both space and population in the New Territories, land reform as the third way of Herklots did not become part of the larger package of experimental space by those actors comprising the strongest networks of disciplinary power. Gregorys observations on geographical imaginations150 and the notion of geographical scale151 inform our understanding of why these divergent perspectives anchored their respective modalities of power. The rationalities of those actors stridently calling for land reform were anchored in geographies of imagination in the sense that Ryan and Hart imagined what was possible within the somewhat utopian shepherd-ock model of fairness, hope and care to replace what they perceived as morally objectionable. Their geographical imaginations were obviously local, but simultaneously regional and global in scale as they believed the experimental space of land tenure could be adopted in China and the Third World, respectively.

778

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

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 illusion of preserving tradition that favored indigenous farmers claims to village land and ideally dovetailed with the situated political rationalities and the resulting spatial practices of the local Cold War conict in the New Territories.152 The preservation of tradition allowed colonial bureaucrats to continue indirect rule as a form of decentralized despotism and simultaneously providing political stability during the critical decades of the post-war period.153 These actors were grounded at the local geographical scale as each represented governmental constituencies comprising the power geometry network of the NTDC cognizant of the local political realities preventing radical changes in land tenure. The issue of granting land tenure to refugee farmers was short-lived because much like peri-urban market gardening elsewhere in the world, it is a transitory form of land use as village landowners in the 1960s began selling their land to residential and industrial interests who gradually transformed the green vegetable spaces of the New Territories. Acknowledgements Special thanks go to Alan Smart of the University of Calgary, Wing-Shing Tang of Hong Kong Baptist University, Michael Hawkins of Ball State University, and James Hayes in Sydney, Australia for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also goes to the CIES Fulbright Exchange Program for providing nancial support during the authors stay in Hong Kong as well as an Association of American Geographers Travel Grant to conduct archival research at the Public Records Oce in London. Notes
1. Colonial Oce (hereafter CO) CO 1030/805, Report on New Territories, Hong Kong. 2. J. Strauch, Middle peasants and market gardeners: the social context of the vegetable revolution in a small agricultural community in the New Territories, Hong Kong, in: D. Faure, J. Hayes and A. Birch (Eds), From Village to City: Studies in the Traditional Roots of Hong Kong Society, Hong Kong, 1984, 191e205. 3. M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Thousand Oaks, 1999. 4. N. Rose and P. Miller, Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, The British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992) 173e206. 5. W.M. Louis, Hong Kong: the critical phase, 1945e1949, American Historical Review 102 (1997) 1052e1984. 6. J. Overton, Colonial Green Revolution? Food, Irrigation and the State in Colonial Malaya, Wallingford, 1994. 7. D. Scott, Colonial governmentality, Social Text 43 (1995) 191e220. 8. D. Gregory, Ideology, Science, and Human Geography, London, 1978. 9. J.S. Duncan, Complicity and resistance in the colonial archive: some issues of method and theory in historical geography, Historical Geography 27 (1999) 119e128. 10. A.L. Stoler and F. Cooper, Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda, in: F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (Eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley, 1997, 1e56; T. Asad, Afterword: from the history of colonial anthropology to the anthropology of western hegemony, in: G.W. Stocking (Ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, Madison, 1991, 314e324. 11. C. Philo, Foucaults geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992) 137e161. 12. T. Tsang, Strategy for survival: the cold war and Hong Kongs policy toward Kuomintang and Chinese Communist activities in the 1950s, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997) 294e317.

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

779

13. J. Darwin, Hong Kong in British decolonisation, in: J.M. Brown and R. Foot (Eds), Hong Kongs Transitions, 1842e1997, Oxford, 1997, 16e33. 14. W.M. Louis, Hong Kong: the critical phase, 1945e1949, American Historical Review 102 (1997) 1052e1984. 15. K. Heatherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, New York, 1997, 40. 16. J. Faubion, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954e1984, Vol II, New York, 1999. 17. L.H. Malkki, National geographic: the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees, in: G. Akhil and J. Ferguson (Eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Durham, 1997, 52e74. 18. C.C. Lai, The role of cooperatives in colonial Taiwan 1913e1945, South African Journal of Economic History 6 (1990) 81e90. 19. M. Foucault, Politics and reason, in: L.D. Kritzman (Ed.), Politics, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977e1984, New York, 1988, 57e85; L. Blake, Pastoral power, governmentality and cultures of order in nineteenth-century British Columbia, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (1999) 79e93; M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Thousand Oaks, 1999. 20. N. Rose, The death of the social? Re-guring the territory of government, Economy and Society 25 (1996) 327e 356. 21. L. Blake, Pastoral power, governmentality and cultures of order in nineteenth-century British Columbia, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (1999) 82. 22. M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Thousand Oaks, 1999. 23. M. Foucault, On governmentality, in: G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (Eds), The Foucault Eect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, 1991, 87e104. 24. S.G. Davis, Hong Kong in its Geographical Setting, London, 1949. 25. J.M. Potter, Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant: Social and Economic Change in a Hong Kong Village, Berkeley, 1968. 26. A. Chun, Unstructuring Chinese Society: the Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of Land in the New Territories of Hong Kong, Singapore, 2000. 27. W.J. Blackie, Kaadorie Agricultural Aid Association, 1951e1971, Hong Kong, 1972. 28. M. Topley, Capital, saving and credit: indigenous rice farmers and immigrant vegetable farmers in Hong Kongs New Territories, in: R. Firth and B.S. Yamey (Eds), Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies, London, 1964, 157e186. 29. G.B. Maseeld, A History of the Colonial Agricultural Service, Oxford, 1972. 30. CO 129/587/17, Botanical and Forestry Department: Proposed Formation of Agricultural Section. 31. CO 129/587/17, Botanical and Forestry Department: Proposed Formation of Agricultural Section. 32. D. Linehan and P. Gruudd, Unruly topographies: unemployment, citizenship and land settlement in inter-war Wales, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29 (2004) 46e63. 33. J.E. Lewis, Tropical east ends and the Second World War: some contradictions in Colonial Oce welfare initiatives, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28 (2000) 42e66. 34. K. Fedorowich, Decolonization deferred? The re-establishment of colonial rule in Hong Kong, 1942e1945, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28 (2000) 25e50. 35. CO 129/572/11, Bishop of Hong Kong agricultural schemes. 36. CO 129/587/17, Bishop of Hong Kong agricultural schemes. 37. M. Freedman, Shifts of power in Hong Kongs New Territories, Journal of Asian and African Studies 1 (1966) 3e12. 38. A. Chun, Unstructuring Chinese Society: the Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of Land in the New Territories of Hong Kong, Singapore, 2000. 39. A. Giddens, The Nation State and Violence, Cambridge, 1985, 10. 40. M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Thousand Oaks, 1999; N. Rose and P. Miller, Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992) 173e206. 41. C.P. Lo, Changing population distribution in the Hong Kong New Territories, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58 (1968) 273e284; L.F. Goodstadt, Farming nance, Far Eastern Economic Review (February 6, 1964).

780

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

42. CO 1030/292, Reports by Governor of Hong Kong on Internal Political and Economic Matters. 43. Refugee inux continues, South China Morning Post (May 12, 1962). 44. C.T. Wong, Uses of agricultural land: some changes in New Territories farming patterns, in: D.J. Dwyer (Ed.), The Changing Face of Hong Kong: Proceedings of a Weekend Symposium of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, Hong Kong, 1971, 17e35. 45. J. Hayes, Tsuen Wan: Growth of a New Town and its People, Hong Kong, 1993, 29. 46. G. Aijmer, A note on agricultural change in Hong Kong, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 12 (1972) 201e206; Some traditional rice cultivators did switch to growing vegetables because of much greater nancial returns. For example, a vegetable farmer could earn $HK 20,000 a year, some 200 percent greater than a rice farmer growing two paddy crops a year, and this under conditions where the average rice farm was 0.6 hectares and that of the vegetable farmer was 0.2 hectares, C.T. Wong, Uses of agricultural land: some changes in New Territories farming patterns, in: D.J. Dwyer (Ed.), The Changing Face of Hong Kong: Proceedings of a Weekend Symposium of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, Hong Kong, 1971, 17e35; V.F.S. Sit, Agriculture under the urban shadow, in: V.F.S. Sit (Ed.), Urban Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1981, 125e140. 47. G. Aijmer, An enquiry into Chinese settlement patterns: the rural squatters of Hong Kong, Man 10 (1975) 559e 570; J. Strauch, Middle peasants and market gardeners: the social context of the vegetable revolution in a small agricultural community in the New Territories, Hong Kong, in: D. Faure, J. Hayes and A. Birch (Eds), From Village to City: Studies in the Traditional Roots of Hong Kong Society, Hong Kong, 1984, 191e205. 48. J.M. Lee, Colonial Development and Good Government, Oxford, 1967, 30. 49. A. Escobar, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, 1995. 50. M. Havinden and D. Meridith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850e1960, New York, 1993. 51. N. Rose and P. Miller, Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992) 173e206. 52. M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Thousand Oaks, 1999. 53. J.M. Lee, Colonial Development and Good Government, Oxford, 1967, 30. 54. D. Goldsworthy, Colonial Iissues in British Politics, 1945e1961, Oxford, 1971. 55. Foucault, Politics and reason. 56. D. Scott, Colonial governmentality, Social Text 43 (1995) 191e220. 57. M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Thousand Oaks, 1999, 20e27. 58. T. Zeleza, The political economy of British colonial development and welfare in Africa, Transafrican Journal of History 15 (1985) 139e161. 59. M. Havinden and D. Meridith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850e1960, New York, 1993. 60. G.B. Maseeld, A History of the Colonial Agricultural Service, Oxford, 1972. 61. J.M. Hodge, Science, development, and empire: the colonial advisory council on agriculture and animal health, 1929e1943, Journal of Imperial History and Commonwealth History 30 (2002) 1e26. 62. G.B. Maseeld, A History of the Colonial Agricultural Service, Oxford, 1972. 63. D. Chi-Kwan, A reward for good behavior in the cold war: bargaining over the defense of Hong Kong, 1949e 1957, International History Review 22 (2000) 757e1008; T. Tsang, Strategy for survival: the cold war and Hong Kongs policy toward Kuomintang and Chinese Communist activities in the 1950s, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (1997) 294e317. 64. A. Smart, Forgotten obstacles, neglected forces: explaining the origins of Hong Kong public housing, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7 (1989) 179e196. 65. G.B. Maseeld, A History of the Colonial Agricultural Service, Oxford, 1972. 66. N. Rose and P. Miller, Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992) 173e206. 67. G. O Tuathail, Spiritual geopolitics, in: K. Dodds and D. Atkinson D (Eds), Geopolitical Traditions: a Century of Geopolitical Thought, New York, 2000, 187e210. 68. A. Birmingham, Father Tom Ryan, in: Jesuit Tea Book, Jesuit Messenger Oce, Dublin, 1972, 4e8. 69. H. Ingrams, Hong Kong, London, 1952.

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

781

70. G. O Tuathail, Spiritual geopolitics, in: K. Dodds and D. Atkinson D (Eds), Geopolitical Traditions: a Century of Geopolitical Thought, New York, 2000, 187e210. 71. J.E. Lewis, Tropical east ends and the Second World War: some contradictions in Colonial Oce welfare initiatives, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28 (2000) 42e66. 72. J. Hayes, Friends and Teachers, Hong Kong, 1996. 73. M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, Thousand Oaks, 1999, 34. 74. Hong Kong Public Records Oce (hereafter HKRS, D&S) HKRS 41, D&S 1/2075, Vegetables e Vegetable Consumers Cooperative Society. 75. A.L. Stoler and F. Cooper, Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda, in: F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (Eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley, 1997, 1e56. 76. O. Christabels and E.H. Whetham, History of British Agriculture: 1846e1914, Newton Abbot, 1971. 77. M. Digby and S. Gorst, Agricultural Co-operation in the United Kingdom, Oxford, 1957. 78. J.K. Bowers, British agricultural policy since the Second World War, Agricultural History Review 33 (1985) 66e76. 79. M. Topley, Capital, saving and credit: indigenous rice farmers and immigrant vegetable farmers in Hong Kongs New Territories, in: R. Firth and B.S. Yamey (Eds), Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies, London, 1964, 64. 80. CO 129/587/17, Botanical and Forestry Department: Proposed Formation of Agricultural Section. 81. CO 129/587/17, Botanical and Forestry Department: Proposed Formation of Agricultural Section. 82. P. Mc Donough, Men Astutely Trained: a History of the Jesuits in the American Century, New York, 1992, 81. 83. M. Digby and S. Gorst, Agricultural Co-operation in the United Kingdom, Oxford, 1957. 84. M. Digby and S. Gorst, Agricultural Co-operation in the United Kingdom, Oxford, 1957; The role of the Roman Catholic Church in the establishment of cooperative creameries in some Irish counties during the late 1800s was instrumental as parish priests often assumed the chairmanship of these cooperative societies: W. Jenkins, Capitalists and co-operators: agricultural transformation, contested space, and identity politics in South Tipperary, Ireland, 1890e1914, Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 87e111. 85. M. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity, London, 1982. 86. D. Scott, Colonial governmentality, Social Text 43 (1995) 191e220. 87. S.W.K. Chiu and Ho-fung Hung, State building and rural stability, in: Tak-Wing Ngo (Ed.), Hong Kongs History, New York, 1999, 74e100. 88. HKRS 170, D&S 1/636 (2), Agriculture: Vegetable Marketing Schemes. 89. M. Topley, Capital, saving and credit: indigenous rice farmers and immigrant vegetable farmers in Hong Kongs New Territories, in: R. Firth and B.S. Yamey (Eds), Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies, London, 1964, 157e186. 90. Goodstadt, Are the farmers worth it? Far Eastern Economic Review (September 15, 1966). 91. CO 129/587/17, Botanical and Forestry Department: Proposed Formation of Agricultural Section. 92. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, New York, 1978. 93. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393, Farming New Territories. 94. J.M. Potter, Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant: Social and Economic Change in a Hong Kong Village, Berkeley, 1968. 95. D. Linehan and P. Gruudd, Unruly topographies: unemployment, citizenship and land settlement in inter-war Wales, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29 (2004) 46e63. 96. HKRS 41, D&S 1/1279, Wholesale Vegetable Market Petition from Farmers in Kowloon and New Territories. 97. CO 129 587/17; HKRS 41, D&S 1/1279; HKRS 170, D&S 1/636 (2); HKRS 163, D&S 1/826, Vegetable Marketing e Long Term Policy. 98. HKRS 170, D&S 1/636 (2). 99. A.L. Stoler, Perceptions of protest: dening the dangerous in colonial Sumatra, American Ethnologist 12 (1985) 642e658. 100. P. Deery, Terminology of terrorism: Malaya, 1948e1952, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (2003) 231e247. 101. J.M. Hodge, Science, development, and empire: the colonial advisory council on agriculture and animal health, 1929e1943, Journal of Imperial History and Commonwealth History 30 (2002) 1e26. 102. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826, Vegetable Marketing e Long Term Policy. 103. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826, Vegetable Marketing e Long Term Policy.

782 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

C.A. Airriess / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 763e783 HKRS 70, D&S 2/393, Farming New Territories. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393, Farming New Territories. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393, Farming New Territories. HKRS 41, D&S 1/5155, New Territories Agrarian Policy. HKRS 41, D&S 1/5155, New Territories Agrarian Policy. HKRS 41, D&S 1/2075, Vegetables e Vegetable Consumers Cooperative Society. D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, Cambridge, 1994. U. Kalpagam, Colonial governmentality and the economy, Economy and Society 29 (2000) 418e438. W.S. Tang, The Foucauldian Concept of Governmentality and Spatial Practice: an Introductory Note, Occasional Paper, Vol. 139, Hong Kong, 1997; N. Rose and P. Miller, Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, The British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992) 173e206. W.S. Tang, The Foucauldian Concept of Governmentality and Spatial Practice: an Introductory Note, Occasional Paper, Vol. 139, Hong Kong, 1997, 15. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1), Land Tenure in the New Territories. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1). 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 credit for tenant farmers was naturally favored because it was an easier alternative to the daunting bureaucratic responsibilities of granting land ownership to refugee vegetable farmers. But, there also existed a strong political agenda as well. Immediately after the war, and before credit and loan programs were oered by the VMO, the Mainland Bank of China established branch operations in the colony and it was a concern that capital would be made of the fact that it was the Chinese Government (for it is a national bank) that was helping the farmers and not the Hong Kong government:HKRS 41, D&S 1/2075. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1). HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (1). HKRS 70, D&S 2/393. No government published land tenure statistics specically isolating vegetable farmers as an enumeration category were published. Approximately 50 percent of farmers in The 1961 Census of Population were categorized as being tenant occupiers, but this included all categories of farmers. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826. HKRS 163, D&S 1/826. HKRS 70, D&S 2/393. By 1960 no survey had yet to be conducted. In that same year, the non-governmental New Territories Agricultural Association was oered funds from the Asia Foundation to conduct a social and economic survey of New Territories farming families HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (2), Land Tenure in the New Territories. It is not known whether this particular survey was ever carried out. HKRS 156, D&S 1/1003 (2). HKRS 126, D&S 1/1003 (1). HKRS 126, D&S 1/1003 (1). CO 1030/381, Problem of Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong. Foucault, On governmentality. B. Cohn, Colonialism and its Form of Knowledge, Princeton, 1966; B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, 1991.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

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

783

137. W.S. Tang, The Foucauldian Concept of Governmentality and Spatial Practice: an Introductory Note, Occasional Paper, Vol. 139, Hong Kong, 1997; N. Rose and P. Miller, Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, 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 and after 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 Kongs 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 Kongs 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 the Belgian 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: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, 1991. 153. M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, Princeton, 1995.