LAND AND LEADERSHIP IN THE H.K. REGION OF KWANGTUNG 93
A scattered community of peasant farmers and petty shopkeepers might seem, educationally speaking, incapable of taking a lead in public business, and too engrossed in their own affairs to wish to do so, thus creating a power vacuum which might be filled from outside. However, enquiries into local history in the period under review show that outsiders seem to have taken no part in organising local affairs. This was not because there was a lack of interested outsiders. Two very different parties had an interest in the island and might conceivably have taken the initiative. There were the shopkeepers and fish-dealers from the neighbouring market centres on the islands of Cheung Chau and Peng Chau who had an economic interest in the people of the island's southern coast and its produce. There was also a more likely candidate for local leadership in the person of the family of scholar gentry from near Canton that collected rents in silver from the island's land population every year. This family appears to have collected rents for centuries by virtue of a grant of land which went back to Sung times (960-1278); but in the 19th century their interest in the island seems to have been confined to securing their income and, on the evidence of commemorative tablets, making occasional contributions to the repair of local temples at the request of the organising committees. No one now living can recall or has heard tell of their taking a part in the arbitration of local disputes in the last quarter of the century, which is the only period for which there is reliable first-hand information. As for the shopkeepers and other commercial people in the market centres, the surviving evidence, oral and documentary, points to a degree of financial exploitation through foreclosure on debts by taking fields and property in pawn, and by usury, but little in the way of directing local affairs.
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Instead, local leadership, other than the internal or village leadership exercised within the various clans who in some cases constituted an entire village, and in others shared the settlement, was provided by such village persons as rose above their local environment by reason of business acumen and personal ability and can be said to have created their own wider area of influence on the island.
Three such persons have come to my notice. One of them flourished in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and the other two in its second half. It is fairly certain that there were other