ABSTRACT
Taking a closer look at Da Shu, a village about 25 kilometers from the city center of Hong Kong, this chapter captures the overwhelming changes taking place in the New Territories in the late twentieth century. Conceptually, the continuity of Chinese rural society in the New Territories, as many researchers have shown, is contingent upon a dynamic combination of internal and external forces of change.1 This chapter draws on oral materials to reconstruct the setting of Da Shu village, its relations with nearby villages settled by the Deng surname in the region of Fu Mei Au, and the change of this country throughout the British colonial era. It particularly examines the economic base of the village, labor migration from the village to the outside world, and the effects of rapid urbanization and industrialization from the urban areas of Hong Kong. It argues that the status of “indigenous groups” which legally determined the access to land resources and economic privileges for the Deng villagers over the past thirty to forty years was a result of the official ramification of Chinese lineage-society under British colonial rule.
