Tsuen Wan

Perhaps no other part of post-war Hong Kong experienced the trauma of rapid urbanization and industrialization as intensely as did Tsuen Wan. The district (including Kwai Chung, Tsing Yi, Ma Wan, and north-east Lantau) was once known for its sweet pineapples and fiercely independent villagers. The arrival of floods of refugees from China converted it into a loose hotchpotch of people and a polluted and overcrowded centre for Hong Kong's burgeoning textile industry and expanding port. Tsuen Wan: Growth of a 'New Town' and Its People is the story of this metamorphosis. Formerly Tsuen Wan's Town Manager and District Officer, James Hayes offers a first-hand glimpse inside government and its relations with local residents at a time when Tsuen Wan was a guinea-pig for some of the administration's first efforts at relocating masses of people and implementing large-scale urban development, town planning, and more representative district-level government. He writes with wit and insight of the local people whose traditional ways of life have been irrevocably altered by post-war growth.

To make a place is to create a location where its creators can feel they belong. Processes of place-making are still very much ongoing today. Geographers, sociologists, political scientists and philosophers of advanced capitalism have said that place is a localisation of the global. However, the creation of a place is not legible from such grand perspectives. It is also much more creative than can be predicted by translating large-scale processes into local cultures. Anthropologists have been sensitive to the intimate, tragic and lyrical senses of local place. But their theorising has been too much bound up with cosmology and insufficiently with the intermediate scales of state and local state. In this book, Stephan Feuchtwang and his contributors offer a set of historical, anthropological and scale-mediated studies from China - a country that includes a subcontinental variety of cultures and landscapes. In the twentieth century it experienced collapse in civil war and was then reasserted as a particularly strong state. Now it is managing the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. These intriguing Chinese studies contribute to the anthropology of place and space, providing an historical perspective on processes of change and of accommodation to disruption. The stories they tell are fascinating in their own right, but in addition, the result is a critical reformulation of previous theories of place that geographers, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists will find of great interest.

This book challenges the widely held belief that Hong Kong's political culture is one of indifference. The term "political indifference" is used to suggest the apathy, naivete, passivity, and utilitarianism of Hong Kong's people toward political life. Taking a broad historical look at political participation in the former colony, Wai-man Lam argues that this is not a valid view and demonstrates Hong Kong's significant political activism in thirteen selected case studies covering 1949 through the present. Through in-depth analysis of these cases she provides a new understanding of the nature of Hong Kong politics, which can be described as a combination of political activism and a culture of depoliticization.

This resource includes full details of Hong Kong harbour, its shopping and nightlife districts, traditional sites and off-the-beaten track areas of the New Territories and outlying islands. A history and a cultural guide is included, as well as places to eat, drink and sleep on every budget. Background information on post-handover politics and features on festivals, feng shui and Chinese astrology are also included.

The essays in this volume analyze and compare what it means to be Hakka in a variety of sociocultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts including Malaysia, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Taiwan, and contemporary China.

The folklore of ancient China considered the dragon a symbol of power and goodness that was used for the benefit of all. However, over the course of time the dragon has taken on a more apprehensive attribute as it tries to restrain various thoughts and ideas that it considers dangerous. Will Hong Kong defend itself first or will it succumb to the will of the dragon?

Drawing on almost fifty years of research and first-hand experience, Elizabeth Lominska Johnson and Graham E. Johnson have produced a masterpiece of ethnography, a fine-grained study of the transformation of a rural district into a chaotic industrial—and now post-industrial—city. Their work has implications far beyond its specific location; scholars of history, anthropology and sociology, urban planning, ethnomusicology, women’s studies, political science, ethnic relations, and China studies in general will all find it meaningful. Tsuen Wan was incorporated into colonial Hong Kong in 1898. The original inhabitants were Hakka who were guaranteed land rights, which were central to later developments. After the Japanese war, the town was overwhelmed by vast numbers of immigrants—fleeing civil war and revolution—seeking employment in rapidly developing industries. The newcomers were welcomed as tenants, but in the absence of firm planning guidelines, their number far exceeded the town’s capacity to house and accommodate them. The original inhabitants were firmly rooted in villages and elaborate kinship organizations; the immigrants similarly relied on voluntary associations to help them face the many challenges that change brought into their lives. Over time, the government became more interventionist and developed Tsuen Wan as the first planned new town in Hong Kong’s New Territories. In recent years, the culture of the original inhabitants has been diluted and differences among immigrants have diminished as all have assumed a general Hong Kong identity. ‘I have no doubt that this is an important book. It covers a large number of topics that will intrigue sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and historians who work on developing societies. The book can be easily mined for data and comparative ethnography on a wide range of subjects from family organization to styles of leadership. For scholars focusing on Chinese society, this is a must-read.’ —James Watson, Harvard University ‘The authors show us the dynamic interactions between tradition and modernity in Tsuen Wan’s everyday life during the time when the “New Town” was undergoing rapid industrialization. They give us a comprehensive account of the social development of the villages in the area, taking us on a historical tour filled with surprises and excitement.’ —Sidney Cheung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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