Hong Kong's serried ranks of high-rises, stuffed with small flats, are the epitome of modern city living. Yet more than half of the 425 square-mile territory is green: outside the dense urban centers lie countryside and mountainous jungle dotted with ancient villages. Many are still inhabited by the clans who founded them hundreds of years ago.
Families gather in ancestral halls bearing the names of their forefathers, who are buried in traditional horseshoe-shaped graves nearby, nestled at the spots on the hillsides with the most auspicious feng shui. By dint of this historical connection, some villagers receive a valuable and controversial privilege: the right to buy land at a discount from the government and to build a house on it, of a size most Hong Kongers would envy.
The system has become a topic of fierce debate in the territory — a proxy war, in effect, between prodemocracy activists and the most powerful defender of the privileges: China's ruling Communist Party.
The party seized power in China 68 years ago on the back of a rural rebellion fueled by hatred of landlords. In Hong Kong, however, the twists and turns of history have left it on the other side; the territory's rural landowners are a pillar of the party's support.
They have a seat reserved for them in Hong Kong's quasi-parliament, the Legislative Council (or Legco). They also have 26 guaranteed seats in the 1,200-member committee that elects Hong Kong's leader. In a territory bitterly divided between democrats and the party's backers, the party needs any friends it can get.
In recent months, prodemocracy politicians have been mounting a vocal campaign against the rural landowners, whose privileges they consider deeply unfair. At issue is what is known, ironically enough, as the "small-house policy." This was introduced in 1972, a quarter-century before Britain handed Hong Kong back to China. It grants male villagers the right to build a house of up to three stories on a plot of land in their ancestral village. If they have no land themselves, they can buy it from the government at a discount.
It is a policy wrapped in layers of unfairness. First, there is the obvious discrimination between men and women: the policy is exempt from Hong Kong's sex-discrimination laws. It applies only to "indigenous" men who can trace their ancestry through the male line to occupants of their village at the time when Britain took control.
Therein lies a third layer of inequity: the policy applies only to inhabitants of villages in the New Territories, a largely rural district of Hong Kong. Villagers in the rest of Hong Kong (there are very few of them) do not get the same deal.