The making of a market town in rural Hong Kong: The Luen Wo market

This essay aims to examine the economic and political meanings behind the building of a rural market town in Hong Kong's New Territories and the patterns and meanings of shares ownership of the market, which is run by a limited company. William Skinner argues that analysing the Chinese marketing system can capture the peasant's social life beyond the narrow horizons of his village and the interlineage ties at regional levels. This approach challenges anthropological work on Chinese society, which has focused almost exclusively on the lineage village, thus distorting the reality of rural social structure.2 Unlike Skinner, and also other scholars such as Fei Xiaotong, who have treated the establishment of the market town as a natural development,3 Maurice Freedman rather pays more attention to how competition between lineage villages is manifested in the formation and control of the rural markets.4 Adopting Skinner and Freedman's analytical framework collectively in studying periodic markets in rural Hong Kong, scholars highlight the political and economic aspects in delineating the dynamic relationships between the villages.5 However, unlike those previous works laying great emphasis on local conflict as a prime reason for establishing rural markets, this essay intends to demonstrate that the formation of Luen Wo Market was not only in competition with the neighbouring Shek Wo Market. In addition, it was also closely associated with a great change in agricultural land use in Hong Kong and the government's agricultural policy in response to the political unrest in China in the late 1940s. As the market was formed as a limited liability company, in which company shares were sold to raise capital, this essay will address the extent of involvement of the villagers in this building project. Attention is paid to the villagers of the Pang lineage in Fanling, where I conducted my fieldwork from the end of 1993 to early 1995.1 argue that, though many rural markets in Hong Kong's New Territories were formed by issuing shares to raise capital, scholars nevertheless have ignored or not attempted to examine the meanings of the shares as property to those shareholders and how these meanings affect or shape the villagers' management of the property.6 As a result, those studies portray the ownership of the shares as stable or static and that all shareholders assume the same meanings concerning the property. The study of the Luen Wo Market scrutinises the process of how the shareholders manipulated or redefined company shares as power resources, family patrimony and inalienable property. It demonstrates the dynamics and patterns of shares ownership of a local market.