Away from the mirrored canyons of Hong Kong’s financial district, across the Tai Lam hills that spill toward the Chinese border, women in broad-brimmed rattan hats tend fields of watercress rippling in the spring breezes.
New houses in pink and peach edge the fields, circling and intruding along the paths that lace together Ma Tin village. Older brick houses with tiled, upswept roofs are giving way rapidly to the two- and three-story blocky, air-conditioned, antennaed homes that bespeak affluence and modernity.
But in Ma Tin, and in some 650 other villages sprinkled across what is called the New Territories, the legacy that is slowly eroding is not one of British colonialism but of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu era that collapsed in 1911 but whose historic tendrils snake into the lives of 700,000 villagers.
“It is very common that women have no rights in the villages,” Cheng Lai-sheung said in the local Cantonese dialect as she massaged a patient’s ankle at her small acupuncture clinic. “You’re not supposed to speak out because it’s against filial piety and tradition. That’s the way it’s been since the Qing dynasty.”
Indeed, even before: Law and custom from the Qing dynasty, a period of rule by Manchu invaders that endured from 1644 to 1911, derived in great measure from earlier Chinese dynasties.
As the colony’s British rulers continued to consolidate their control over Hong Kong Island and nearby territories in the middle to late 1800s, Britain agreed that Qing law, and not British colonial law, would have force in the New Territories, a region that earlier in this century was little more than a scattering of farming villages.
During the last few weeks, elections for village heads were held in the Territories, and in many villages women were not allowed to vote. In some, husbands voted for wives, and in others male relatives cast votes for widows, a tradition that has endured since the Qing dynasty.
But now this legacy is perhaps the last tangible remnant of China’s dynastic history, after the British gradually introduced notions of Western liberal law in Hong Kong throughout this century.
Last year, after a vigorous and not infrequently vicious debate, another Qing legacy was legislated out of existence: the practice of denying women in the New Territories inheritance rights.
A campaign for this change was largely provoked in 1991, when Cheng’s parents died. Her brothers, who no longer lived in the village, decided to sell the family’s home, although Cheng lived there and wanted to keep the house. But the brothers sold it anyway, and the new owners occupied the first two floors. Cheng remained on the top floor.
“I refused to budge,” she said.
After two years of harassment intended to get her to leave, she began writing to the government and legislators.
“I wanted them to rescind the old law from the Qing dynasty saying women can’t inherit anything,” said Cheng, 43.
One legislator was Christine Loh Kung-wai, a former commodities trader for Salomon Brothers who in 1991 was appointed to the Hong Kong Legislative Council.
“Under Qing law,” said Loh, who studied law before beginning her 12-year career as a trader, “even if your parents want to give you something after they died, they could not if you are a female.”
So last year, Loh and her colleagues began the process of overriding Qing law with a new inheritance law, one identical to that in force in the rest of Hong Kong. Her effort stirred a wildfire of protest from the male villagers, from the village heads and even from some members of the legislature.
“Male villagers said I was destroying their culture,” Loh said. “They said they were going to rape me, beat me.”
The law was changed last summer, but women such as Cheng, who finally moved out of the house late last year, continued to press for changes that would extend equal protection in all facets of life, particularly in the village elections.
“Village elders don’t do much,” Cheng said. “Traditionally they mediate in fights among families or friends. They notify residents when somebody dies so that everybody can help out. Also, all transactions in the village, such as the buying and selling of property, or even the birth or death of people, bear their signatures. So naturally I would like to see women given the right to vote for village elders.”
Many village leaders are unhappy about the crumbling of tradition. Liu Kam-choi, the head of Sheung Shui Wai village, explained his view to a local reporter: “We welcome women to vote, but they are not interested. They trust us. It doesn’t matter to them who wins.”
Away from Ma Tin village, in Hong Kong’s commercial district, Loh vowed that the law would be changed, that the last vestiges of Manchu domination, long since eradicated in China, would be erased from Hong Kong as well.
Indeed, even after China resumes sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, she said, laws made now will most likely be preserved and village elders should face that fact.
“There are still villages not prepared to give women the right to vote,” she said. “One has no choice. We will change the law.”
