Unpacking the multifaceted rurality of Hong Kong’s countryside: A social representation approach

Abstract

In Hong Kong, a global metropolis with a vast countryside occupying about 60% of land use, “de-ruralisation” in terms of depopulation and marginalisation of rural villages has started since the 1960s. Nonetheless, it does not necessarily lead to the vanishment of rurality. On the contrary, rural spaces have been (re)appropriated and (re)imagined through re-establishing different internal and external socio-spatial relationships. Meanwhile, the intensive rural-urban interactions and the uneven power relations between various stakeholders at local and global scales have rendered multifaceted rurality. This paper aims to unravel the polysemic and polyvalent rurality of Hong Kong’s countryside through a social representation approach. Based on a questionnaire survey (N= 1,089, including 976 visitors and 113 villagers), this study identifies five distinct clusters of rural representations: 1) rural idyll consumerists, consuming the idyllic image of the rural 2) urbanists, envisaging urbanisation as the future of the rural; 3) rural utopianists, specifically attracted by the rural lifestyle; 4) rural conservationists, with strong interests in ecological and biodiversity conservation; 5) rural dull realists, regarding rural as unattractive and hopeless. Overall, these representations mainly revolve around a dialectical relation between rural idyll and rural dull emerging from the intensified urban-rural interactions and the uneven power relations among villagers, urbanites, environmentalists, business interests, and government organisations. This study offers a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted rurality within a global metropolis to enrich the rural epistemology and to provide a practical framework to inform rural revitalisation and conservation strategies.