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Subsumption of Hong Kong Space into the British Colonial Apparatus

2018; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-69793-2_2

1866-6515

Fujio Mizuoka,

Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics

Once upon a time, aboard flights landing in the former Hong Kong International Airport (Kai Tak), passengers were frightened to see the densely packed cityscape of Kowloon Peninsula just a few hundred metres below them. Now that Hong Kong International Airport has moved to Chek Lap Kok, they feel deceived by the comfortably expanding grassy hills of Lantau Island, with hardly a house upon it, except for only a small patch of new development at the bottom of the hill. Indeed, the apparently ‘overpopulated’ Hong Kong is still endowed with much empty space. In 1996, a year before the British were to leave Hong Kong, only 175 km2 out of 1095 km2, or 16.0% of the colony’s land, was classified as ‘developed land’, which was either in active urban use for putting up commercial buildings, residential housing, industrial or government buildings, roads or rail rights-of-way, or was left vacant awaiting development. Adding agricultural fields, fish-breeding ponds, live-stock farms and reservoirs and the area of land actively used for economic purposes merely made up 290 km2 or 26.5% of the total area of Hong Kong as of 1996.