The rise of New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology (“OOO”) in the past two decades roughly coincided with a decade of horizontal, leaderless movements, both of which seemed to react to a political landscape exhausted by the figure of the professional activist/organizer. Along with work by and inspired by Sylvia Wynter, New Materialist and OOO works have helped to usher in the scholarly deprivileging of anthropocentrism as well as questioning the assumptions of Western scientific rationality and the logics of coloniality and racism that underpin them. Into this fray, New Materialism and OOO’s decentering of human agency by examining our interdependence within and on ecological systems as well as the “agency” or affective forces of non-human objects and beings, often end up obviating (intentionally or not) the organizational forms and structures that still provide important avenues for resistance against the ecocidal neoliberal state.
In his novel, Three Villages: A Wang Chau Story, Michael Leung avoids these excesses by drawing from a broad range of autonomous theory, including Situationism and insurrectionary anarchism, and aligning them with a recognition of a shared “pluriversality” (a term from decolonial theory that refuses the hegemony of a universalist Western tradition) that includes a place for non-human agency. Leung draws from real life land justice struggles in Hong Kong’s New Territories to weave a narrative of autonomous anti-eviction struggles against government-backed property developers across several rural villages. This move offers its own submerged assessment of the undoing of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests that itself was a reaction against the protest forms of uprisings past such as the trust in student activist leaders of 2012 and the emphasis on static occupations in 2014. As the most recent revolt seemed to run headlong into modernist liberal political norms with a tinge of colonial nostalgia, Leung’s turn to land justice and ecological framings of Hong Kong resistance broadens the scope of what we consider political actors as well as the grounds upon which such action can take place. It also draws from a different submerged political history of radical action such as the 2009 Anti-High Speed Rail protests, which saw rural villagers protesting a rail link between Guangzhou and Hong Kong that would demolish their homes. This history forms the foundation for the events that Leung narrativizes in Three Villages.
While it is not clear whether Leung’s characters are fictitious versions of real life comrades or fictitious altogether, he sketches them with a careful humanism all the same, thereby engaging the dialectical possibilities of fiction as an aid to political organizing and vice versa. The novel begins from the perspective of a lanternfly and ends, poignantly, in the voice of the “second tallest tree” in Wang Chau, bookending a narrative composed of vignettes from a multitude of perspectives from activists, animals, plants, and other-than-human agents. This structure avoids valorizing an expected political actor or human protagonist through which we view the land struggles but rather takes rural villagers’ and their ways of being with the land—often expressed in the novel through charming, forthright declarations of conviction and homely conviviality—as a starting point. One could view this as exploring the different determinations and possibilities of Hong Kong’s current post-protest landscape: a continuation of the anti-”Big Stage” ethos of the 2019 protests, or perhaps a break from the way those same protests had been exploited by geopolitical interests in the West.
From here, Leung’s account of land justice struggle explores the experiences of elderly subsistence farmers and the college/educated students who work together with them through meditations on the realities of social and political mediation, Indigeneity, and convivial direct action practices that generate critical social infrastructures for future action.
STATE & REPRESENTATION
Today, people in both urban and rural settings have their entire social existence, in the words of Søren Mau, “mediated by a complex system of infrastructures, data, machines, financial flows, and planetary supply chains.” Hong Kong, as government marketing language has long insisted, is a “world city,” positioned for decades to direct and be penetrated by the economic, social, and cultural forces of global capital. As a former colonial entrepot-cum-financial services hub that links inter alia the two biggest economies in the world, the global is felt within the local in Hong Kong on a daily basis, whether one is conscious of it or not. In the case of Wang Chau, it is clear that the primary conflict in these land justice struggles is between the repressive corporate-capitalist state’s self-given mandate to mediate all Hongkongers’ relationship to the land and regular villagers’ land stewarding actions. Importantly, Leung also examines subtler forms of antagonistic political and social mediation. One such form is the overstuffed bureaucratic layer of the civil service, which includes sympathetic elected officials, aggressive LandsD (Lands Department) functionaries who lead forced evictions, and the more conciliatory government social worker. None of them engage with villagers’ beliefs and practices of land stewardship but simply treat them as constituents to be cajoled, repressed, or “listened to.” One episode centers on a social worker who calls himself “Durian” and confronts two characters who have recently moved to Wang Chau to assist the villagers in their resistance: Tammy, a doctoral student, and Kin, an artist and cafe-worker. Durian claims that he knows the villagers better than them because he has talked to them longer. Instead, they discover that he merely pretends to be friendly with villagers in order to convince them to accept compensation and leave their land.
This manipulative political mediation leads Kin to question his own role as someone who is trying, however altruistically, to represent villagers’ interests, saying: “Durian has got me thinking, those who aren’t villagers, like us and him, all have agendas or jobs as he said. How do we know what we’re doing is “right” or “just”? (62). Tammy encourages him to question binary identity categories of “right or wrong” in favor of assessing one’s (mutable) position within the social and political structures that threaten to dispossess the villagers. She thus reorients Kin’s thinking toward recognizing one’s place as changeable, which puts the focus on how they can work together with villagers, despite not “being one,” rather than being immobilized by rigid categories of “inside” or “outside” (a position of offering solidarity). Through Kin and Tammy’s self-reflexiveness, which critiques the easy role of the self-assured “ally,” Leung puts into question the external position of the well-meaning “graduate student activist,” who parachutes in from their urban, middle-class contexts to “help out” (that is, do their field work) before departing.
The larger point we can draw from Three Villages is that we must be self-reflective about the way that social and political representation may inescapably result in silencing those ostensibly being “helped.”
The larger point we can draw from Three Villages—especially critical for Hong Kong’s political landscape which has long been defined by student-led activism—is that we must be self-reflective about the way that social and political representation may inescapably result in silencing those ostensibly being “helped.” For Leung, who describes the book as providing “decolonial perspectives and approaches” in the Wang Chau land struggle, a straightforward critique of the state is not enough. Rather, he suggests, we must examine all the ways in which (inadvertent) silencing can be an inescapable part of social and political representation. This resonates with the ethos of other radical autonomous political spaces in Hong Kong, such as migrants solidarity committee, autonomous 8a, whose work with migrant domestic workers is driven by the edict to not represent or dictate political programs but to support the direction of the workers’ own organizing with labor and resources. Black Window, likewise, problematizes naturalized categories of “solidarity” and “activism” as concepts that reify one’s position as external to a given mass struggle, arguing that the social infrastructures built in struggle are more crucial than the attainment of any given demand. Leung’s narrative adds to this Hong Kong school of thought through a self-consciousness of one’s position that continually seeks to undo the “outside” position by celebrating the possibilities of communal conviviality that is the making of social infrastructure in action. Drawing from land stewards themselves, we learn that social movements are accretive, like the soil, building up over years and generations.
A minor episode in the text helps to illustrate the contradictions that arise in practice over social position and “insider/outsider” status. In the run up to a Jackfruit Festival organized by villagers, Kin decides not to invite one of his past academic collaborators, Ying, noting vaguely that “he didn’t for some reason.” He continues, adding that he didn’t feel comfortable “talking to people about complicated situations in transient places” (103). Kin, while previously anxious over his own “outsider” status when confronted with Durian’s machinations, then goes on to wield an “insider” mediating power by excluding others who may wish to work together with the villagers in their fight against land developers. Far from an indictment of Kin, this vacillation in his own self-perception in relation to the villagers indexes precisely how complicated this malleability can be. While it is important to counter those who attempt to “lead” marginalized and silenced communities through vanguardism or an attitude of knowing better, this form of critique can often calcify in practice if dictated too forcefully by guilt over one’s social position. Such guilt often leads to a moralized tailism (the idea so prevalent in the 2019 protests and exploited forcefully by less scrupulous right-wing factions): that to avoid imperiousness, one should always follow a nebulous “on the ground” activist group rather than insist on genuine, though difficult, political exchange rooted in democratic practices of deliberation and discussion. This is the essential contradiction that (still) haunts horizontal and leaderless movements and Leung’s critique of mediation helps to bring us back to that discussion.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF INDIGENEITY
In exploring the question of human relationships and responsibilities to the land, Leung engages the contradictions that arise when the local category of “indigenous” is not coextensive with the identity of land steward, as it is in many other Euro-American settler colonial contexts. This conundrum at the heart of much “indigenous” discourse unfolds across various contexts, not just Hong Kong. In the United States, it highlights genocidal settler war against Indigenous people through, among other practices, the rampant destruction of waterways through oil pipelines; in the Israeli Zionist occupation, which claims to be indigenous to the land they occupy while committing brutal ecocide against native plant life such as Palestinian olive groves; or the PRC’s socialist developmentalist program known as “Ecological Civilization” that greenwashes the pastoral nomadism of Indigenous Kazakh life ways through land enclosure and forced settlements. Notably, all of these settler societies have made genocidal self-indigenizing moves in order to assert their legal occupation of the land that they stole, which takes the form of claiming dominion over the mantle of liberty, anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism. By interrogating this contradiction in Hong Kong’s local context, Leung makes a material case that refuses local politics’ often insular, exceptionalist self-framing as well as Hong Kong protesters’ place amongst a global left, which is predisposed to see the city as a one-dimensional capitalist outpost.
Tammy, a character whose research focuses on shedding light on Hong Kong’s “non-indigenous” villages such as Wang Chau and Cha Kwo Ling, sums up the contradiction of the region’s indigenous discourse thusly: “The New Territories, with its patriarchal policies and rampant destruction of farmland and village life, is a percolating colonial residue and demonstrates the impotence of the Hong Kong government 20 years since the 1997 handover” (19). In the New Territories, the English term “indigenous” is a patrilineal legal category defined by the British colonists to refer to male heads of households living in the New Territories prior to its 1898 lease to the colonial government. This syncretization of patriarchal, settler, Western and local legal concepts of property ownership accomplished the pacification and absorption of indigenous residents into the colonial hierarchy while excluding those without landed property rights such as the Tanka1 boat dwelling indigenous people, and, of course, all women. This extension of usufructuary property ownership common to British legal and philosophical concepts of land to the New Territories elevated indigenous men above those who cultivate for subsistence, who were given the British colonial classification of “non-indigenous.” This resulted in the formation of an indigenous elite who retained all legal rights of ownership and patriarchal leadership into the present.
Because of Hong Kong’s artificial land “scarcity” driven by corporate profit-seeking and demands for increasing property valuation, the male descendants of these indigenous inhabitants wield enormous power in a way that those in other European settler colonies do not. This indigenous class is widely acknowledged to be in deep collusion with police, triads, and property developers who join forces to evict villagers so that their land can be capitalized. In other words, this is yet another example of the continuity between colonialities that the PRC’s alleged “decolonization” of Hong Kong has been unwilling or unable to confront.
A corrupt indigenous class is yet another example of the continuity between colonialities that the PRC’s alleged “decolonization” of Hong Kong has been unwilling or unable to confront.
Not merely a question of nomenclature, the disjuncture of indigeneity and land stewardship in the Hong Kong context highlights the temporal question at the heart of many conflicts over who can claim indigeneity. “Who was here first”? Or, who was here longer after a certain arbitrary point in time? Indigeneity in Hong Kong shows that simply being on the land the “longest” (or there shortly before a land was leased, in the New Territories case) cannot be the sole basis of indigenous identity. Rather, the stories and practices of the village communities that Leung writes about make the argument that praxis and the processual, especially in creating environmentally just social infrastructure through action, matters most from an ecological perspective. This is another instance, like the critique of rigid “ally” categories, in which Leung emphasizes that practice can destabilize intractable social categories—which is not to say that characters such as Kin and Tammy can and should claim a “Big I” Indigeneity, but to recognize that their impact in aiding villagers’ land struggle lies in their practice and presence in working with them.
DIRECT ACTION & AUTONOMY
The land struggles in Hong Kong, including in Wang Chau, are all due to the shared investment in a “lexicon of coloniality” (20) between the British colonial state and its successor (some argue, also colonial) Chinese state: while the British created a patriarchal class of elite indigenous men, the Hong Kong successor state maintains the same governing structure that currently leads the violent LandsD evictions and explicitly blocks suffrage as a form of democratic mass participation for Hongkongers. As the state has now outlawed most traditional avenues for change, from stunted electoralism to open demonstrations, the novel’s argument that resistance does not require authorization takes on increased significance. The corollary of Leung’s insight, then, which becomes the practical focus of his novel is that the post-2020 landscape of political and social repression calls for new social infrastructures that may enable this resistance beyond the legal and organizational.
To this end, Leung explores anarchist notions of autonomous direct action through various “unorganized” (that is, not led by a political organization) practices from villager-led rallies, barricades, convivial festivals, and squatting. Kin notes that “squatted buildings should not be seen in isolation—as the government often does and executes eviction accordingly—but instead as a network of relationships with social and cultural value, with unique situations and contexts” (31). Other examples of squatting as resistance in Europe inspire him to write a “squatting timeline” for Hong Kong, noting how this “squatting” history is deeply entwined with its refugee history as well as its colonization by the British and occupation by Imperial Japan. These successive imperial impositions transformed ideas of property ownership, demarcation, and organization of living and labor in relation to land. Major shifts in paradigm include the leasing of the New Territories for 99 years in 1898 (the year of the creation of the indigenous status) and the colonial regime’s assertion of all territory as Crown Land, which was “essentially a colonial land grab, turning inhabitants into tenants” (35). The next day, Kin and Tammy recall the story of farmers in France who invited groups of activists to occupy their farmhouses to prevent the buildings’ demolition to make way for a new airport. The activists rallied around the slogan, “To defend a territory, you have to inhabit it!” This resonates with Hong Kong American artist Simon Leung’s project titled “Squatting Towards Hong Kong,” which explores practices of physically squatting as a way to understand the social and political circumstances of a given site and the insistence on bodily presence as an important form of both resistance and knowledge production.
While Leung’s poetic voice shines in sections written from the perspective of non-human actors, other sections can become bogged down in citational work particularly when they are spoken by human actors. A fuller version of the thesis novel, with footnotes and reference list, actually helps to bring more cohesion to the undulations in tone. Moreover, though this is not the genealogy that Leung draws from (citations available in the longer thesis form range from anarchist, Indigenous, and decolonial texts), I would have been interested to see some engagement with the current spirited debate on Marx’s ideas of metabolic rift amongst ecosocialists concerned with “degrowth”—the notion that capitalist “growth” (a term itself under debate, but generally referring to the full circuit of capitalist production-circulation-consumption) must be altered or stopped in order to avert a planetary climate apocalypse (see: Kohei Saito, Andreas Malm, Jason W. Moore, John Bellamy Foster, Søren Mau along with the pseudo-socialist writings of Leigh Philips and Matt Huber). This is especially the case because, as I mentioned at the beginning, the novel’s structure that incorporates non-human perspectives and agency draws from thinkers who have influenced the field of New Materialisms such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, some of whom have been dismissive of Marxian analysis. An engagement or critique of the degrowth/ecosocialist intervention would bring some additional depth to Leung’s meditation on the land justice struggles in Wang Chau.
An engagement or critique of the degrowth/ecosocialist intervention would bring some additional depth to Leung’s meditation on the land justice struggles in Wang Chau.
The narrative culminates in three autonomous scenes of conviviality: the aforementioned Jackfruit Festival, a spontaneous squat, and global artist performances on village grounds. The example of youth and elderly villagers improvising a squat in a nearby “Big House” under construction provides a moment of theory in action, and an example of what Ding, a college student, calls “convivial resistance” (快樂抗爭). After the joyous occupation, villagers and youth set up lights and sleeping supplies before enjoying a meal together. They start a non-violent and “convivial” Village Patrol to keep a watch for LandsD, security guards, or police. In the end, the villagers’ action results in the owner’s sister Ms. Yeung empathizing with their plight and allowing them to stay. While they acknowledge that this is not a permanent solution that protects their village from the developers, the moment of understanding between the villagers and Ms. Yeung forms its own milestone, unlike in politically managed organizations that work on campaign levels, where the pursuit of the main demand holds the most value. In the wake of the 2019 protests, where often no large-scale victories seem achievable, such minor moments of understanding are critical in near-term regrouping, social repair, and consciousness raising.
Hong Kong’s mass struggles for self-determination have gone through immense change in the past half century, moving through broad phases, from pursuing institutional party-based change; to faith in political organizations; to mass street occupations and international lobbying; to, most recently, a focus on fluid, guerilla-style street fighting alongside classical repertoires of marches and rallies. Now is a moment where many seasoned activists, newly politicized folks, and autonomous resistors have gone underground to build new social infrastructures through reading groups, physical and mental recovery, and other “non-political” activities. Leung’s book comes at a critical time in this moment of abeyance, providing a gorgeous meditation on what kinds of convivial living resistance can and must still take place for our future liberation.
Michael Leung is an artist, designer, and visiting lecturer. His work is situated in everyday life, affected by convivial encounters, and inspired by different autonomous spaces—some of which he shares in his writing, zines, and fictional stories. Michael received his PhD at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, where he researched colonial and “post-colonial” entanglements that have led to the dispossession of villagers’ homes and significant biodiversity loss in Wang Chau, Hong Kong.
Footnotes
- In using the Anglophone term “indigenous,” I have adhered in this review to the way it is conceptualized by Indigenous scholars in Anglophone academia: the capital “I” refers most commonly to a claimed political-cultural subjectivity while a lowercase “i” typically refers to populations (or species) that are considered to be original inhabitants of a given region. Leung and I discussed my use of capital and lowercase i’s in multiple instances throughout this review, sometimes adjusting when necessary. In this case, I am not aware of Tanka people’s self-description as Indigenous in the sense of a political identity, and so have retained the lowercase here. This does not imply, however, that Tanka people didn’t resist modernist colonial governance. For more on Tanka people, and especially on resistance to relocation to public housing in Hong Kong, see Ho Fung Hung, “Thousand-Year Oppression and Thousand-Year Resistance,” Chinese Sociology & Anthropology, Volume 30, 1998.
