Hong Kong has its own version of 'one country, two systems'. Call it 'one city, two standards': one rule of law for metropolitan areas, another for rural areas. Put another way, rural sins are not treated the same way as metropolitan sins.
This dichotomy has its roots in history. When the British acquired the New Territories in 1898 and set about to govern those areas, they had to tread carefully and recognise traditional customs. Today, village farms have virtually disappeared, and formerly rural areas have become more metropolitan, yet many of these rural rights remain entrenched. With each passing generation, they become more anachronistic and problematic.
A good example is the 'village house policy', by which each male descendant of an indigenous villager has the right to build a 'village house' on village land. Many village houses have been sold on to metropolitan buyers who have become the majority inhabitants in some villages. A policy which gives every indigenous village male for all eternity the right to build a house on 700 sq ft of land is not sustainable. It would be even less sustainable if the right were also claimed, on grounds of equality, by village females.
With the return of Hong Kong to China, distinctions between colonial territory and New Territories should have disappeared, but it suited the powers that be to create a powerful rural vested interest that is seen to be patriotic. One result is that the agriculture and fisheries sector has 40 seats in the 800-member committee that elects the chief executive; 5 per cent of the seats for a sector that contributes just 0.1 per cent of gross domestic product. It has made reform of anachronistic policies much more difficult.
'Turning a blind eye' is another common phenomenon in rural areas, be it to breaches of planning or lease restrictions, chronic fly-tipping, illegal road-building or destruction of flora and fauna on government land. The first reaction of government departments is to profess ignorance, the second to profess powerlessness. In truth, lack of action results from inertia, passing the buck and, I suspect, reluctance to upset powerful rural interests. When the administration does bring a case, the judiciary imposes derisory fines that offer no deterrent whatsoever to perpetrators (for example, a rural developer who has built an illegal road to gain access to his village site) who stand to make millions.
The Tai Long Sai Wan case has brought many of these long-standing issues to the fore. How could government departments - particularly the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, which is responsible for management of the Sai Kung Country Park - have been ignorant of what was going on? In Pak Lap village in the same country park, a path that runs from the High Island Reservoir road, crossing government land, was widened and partially paved. How did such illegal works escape the attention of the department? How did the construction machinery get past the country park barrier at Pak Tam Chung, manned by the department? Would such breaches have been tolerated in the urban areas?