Merry Stern 2005 the female inheritance movement

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 3, June 2005� 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4603-0002$10.00

The FemaleInheritance Movementin Hong Kong

Theorizing the Local/GlobalInterface1

by Sally Engle Merry andRachel E. Stern

Human rights concepts dominate discussions about social justiceat the global level, but how much local communities haveadopted this language and what it means to them are far lessclear. As individuals and local social movements take on humanrights ideas, they transform the shape and meaning of rights toaccommodate local understandings. At the same time, they re-tain aspects of the global framework as signs of a global moder-nity that they wish to share. How and when individuals in vari-ous social locations come to see themselves in terms of humanrights is a complicated but critically important question for an-thropologists of globalization as well as for human rights activ-ists. Using the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong inthe early 1990s as a case study, this article argues that the locali-zation of global human rights ideas depends on a complicated setof activist groups with different ideological orientations alongwith translators who bridge the gaps. As it explores the local ap-propriation of global cultural products, it reveals the instabilitiesof global and local and the importance of tracing the processes oftranslation and collaboration that make communication acrossthis continuum possible.

s a l l y e n g l e m e r ry is Marion Butler McLean Professor inthe History of Ideas and Professor of Anthropology at WellesleyCollege (Pendleton East, Rm. 334, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA02481, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). She is also codirector ofthe Peace and Justice Studies Program. She was born December1, 1944, and received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1966,her M.A. from Yale University in 1968, and her Ph.D. from Bran-deis University in 1978. Her Colonizing Hawai’i: The CulturalPower of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) re-ceived the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and SocietyAssociation. Her other publications include Law and Empire inthe Pacific: Hawai’i and Fiji (coedited with Donald Brenneis,Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), Getting Jus-

1. We are grateful to Wellesley College for support for severalmonths of research by Rachel Stern. Research was also supportedby a Mellon New Directions Fellowship and a grant from the Na-tional Science Foundation, Cultural Anthropology and Law and So-cial Sciences Programs, BCS-0094441, to Sally Merry. We receivedhelpful comments from James Hayes, Kevin O’Brien, Harriet Sa-muels, and Alan Smart and from audiences at the University ofPennsylvania, New York University, and Columbia University LawSchool. We appreciate the willingness of the participants in themovement to talk to us about it and are grateful for their insights.

tice and Getting Even (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1990), and Urban Danger (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1981). She is currently completing a book on international hu-man rights and localization processes.

r a c h e l e . s t e r n is a Ph.D. student in the Political ScienceDepartment at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Na-tional Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Her previouspublications include articles in Asian Survey and the China En-vironment Series. Her current research deals with environmentalactivism in China.

The present paper was submitted 28 x 03 and accepted 4 viii 04.

In the spring of 1994, everyone in Hong Kong was talkingabout female inheritance. Women in the New Territorieswere subject to Chinese customary law and, under Brit-ish colonialism, still unable to inherit land. That year,a group of rural indigenous women joined forces withHong Kong women’s groups to demand legal change. Inthe plaza in front of the Legislative Council building,amid shining office buildings, the indigenous women,dressed in the oversized hats of farm women, sang folklaments with new lyrics about injustice and inequality.Demonstrators from women’s groups made speechesabout gender equality and, at times, tore paper chainsfrom their necks to symbolize liberation from Chinesecustomary law (Chan 1995:4). Across the plaza, a con-servative group representing rural elite interests, theHeung Yee Kuk, gathered in large numbers to protestfemale inheritance on the grounds that it would under-mine tradition. One banner held the plaintive message“Why are you killing our culture?” (p. 30).

The starting point for this research was the odd jux-taposition of rural women wearing farm hats and thetransnational rhetoric of rights and gender equality thatthey employed to lobby for legal change. The majorityof these women had never been in the central businessdistrict before. How did they become part of a movementthat framed their grievances as a violation of their humanrights when they needed directions even to find down-town? How did they recognize the potential of legislativechange to solve their particular problems? In otherwords, how were human rights made local? To what ex-tent were they indigenized, that is, translated into localterms that made sense to rural village women?

On a small scale, the 1993–94 female inheritancemovement is a case study of globalization. There is awidespread assumption that the global circulation ofideas is increasing cultural homogeneity, but, as Appa-durai (1996:7) suggests, global ideas circulated throughthe mass media also spark resistance, selectivity, andagency, creating vernacular forms of globalization.2

Scholars emphasize the global circulation of ideas andimages but rarely examine how transnational ideas anddiscourses become localized. The female inheritancemovement offers an opportunity to examine a vernacularform of globalization and to think about how global ideasare reinterpreted in terms of local categories of meaning.

2. Some studies show that global ideas build on local referents toestablish their meaning and value, as in transnational fashions andmusic (see, e.g., Feld 2001).

388 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 3, June 2005

This process of localization is a high-stakes question inthe universalism-versus-relativism debate. Although theidea of human rights creates universal standards (Don-nelly 2003), proponents of Asian values, most famouslyLee Kuan Yew of Singapore, argue that it is based on West-ern individualism and does not readily apply to more col-lectivist Asian societies (see Bauer and Bell 1999:3–23).Although support for Asian values has diminished, it iscommon for members of non-European societies to arguethat the idea of human rights is an alien, Western conceptwhich does not fit into their cultural framework. By fo-cusing on how human rights are interpreted in local cul-tural terms and gain legitimacy within local communi-ties, localization offers one way to bridge the dividebetween universalism and relativism. Anthropological re-search on human rights, for example, focuses on processesof appropriating rights and critiques the notion of an op-position between universalism and relativism (Wilson1996, Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001). Abdullahi An-Na’im also argues that “human rights are much morecredible . . . if they are perceived to be legitimate withinthe various cultural traditions of the world” (1992a:3, seealso An-Na’im 1992b, 2002). He advocates a cross-culturalapproach in which rights are “conceived and articulatedwithin the widest possible range of cultural traditions” asa way of increasing their credibility, legitimacy, and ef-ficacy (1992a:2).

From another angle, there is a growing body of researchon transnational social movements that blends socialmovement theory with transnational network analysis.This work asks how transnational movements and actorspromote normative and political change at the globallevel (Keck and Sikkink 1998, Khagram, Ricker, and Sik-kink 2002, Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999). There ismuch discussion of norm creation because the politicalimpact of transnational nongovernmental organizations(NGOs) often depends on the use of information, per-suasion, and moral pressure (Khagram, Ricker, and Sik-kink 2002:11). Framing, defined as “action-oriented setsof beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate theactivities and campaigns of a social movement organi-zation,” is also an important ingredient in movementsuccess as well as a way to push the creation of newnorms (Snow and Benford 2000:614; see also Tarrow1998). Work on framing, transnational networks, andnorm creation generally explores interaction betweendomestic NGOs, transnational NGOs, movements, andstates. Case studies often look at how coalitions bothtake advantage of existing international norms and in-stitutions and create new ones. For example, AlisonBrysk (2000) shows that Latin American indigenous peo-ple turned to international institutions only after effortsto frame their grievances in terms of rights had failed athome.

This scholarship on transnational movements, how-ever, pays little attention to how local actors come tosee their everyday grievances as violations of humanrights or negotiate between their existing cultural frame-works and rights concepts. For those sympathetic to An-Na’im’s argument, there is little detailed exploration of

what a dialogic approach to human rights means in prac-tice. How do places like Hong Kong manage to employrights language in a way that taps the power of univer-salism while responding to local conditions? Using ananthropological perspective, we examine the female in-heritance movement in its historical, social, economic,and political context as an example of meaning-makingat the grass roots in a rights-based movement. We de-velop a framework for thinking about process—chartinghow and why human rights ideas moved from theirglobal sites of creation to local social movements. Twoideas are important here: layers and translators.

We see the female inheritance movement as a coalitionof distinct layers. We call the different camps “layers”rather than “groups” as a way of conceptualizing theirrelationship to rights language and their relative distancefrom transnational ideas. Following the pioneering workof Stuart Scheingold (1974) and other socio-legal scholars(e.g., McCann 1994, Engel and Munger 2002), we seerights as a resource, albeit a limited one. The layers ofthe female inheritance movement formed a rough hier-archy in terms of the degree to which they tapped intothis resource. For example, one layer emphasized therights dimension of female inheritance while anotherframed the issue in terms of patriarchy and feudal think-ing. The indigenous women themselves, whose storiesformed the narrative core of the movement, generallysaw themselves as the victims of unfeeling and rapaciousmale relatives, although they also came to see them-selves as subject to gender discrimination. The move-ment was an amalgamation of the ways in which thesedifferent layers perceived the issue, incorporating bothparticularistic understandings of grievances and themore generalized framework of human rights.

Despite significant ideological differences, these layerswere able to communicate through the services of peoplewhom we term “translators.” Translators were able toswitch between different ways of framing the problem,facilitating collaboration between people in various lay-ers who did not necessarily say the same thing or thinkabout the issue in the same way. Translators, for ex-ample, helped the indigenous women recast their storiesas violations of a right to protection from gender dis-crimination, something guaranteed by the Hong Konggovernment. These few intermediaries provided criticalbridges between a human rights discourse connected tomodernity and universalism and more particular and in-dividualized ways of thinking about injuries.

This discussion of layers and translators shows thatthe human rights framework can play an important roleeven when rights talk only trickles down to protagoniststhrough the mediation of translators. For a focus on hu-man rights to be an effective political strategy, the ideaof rights need not be adopted by participants at all levelsof the movement and need not be culturally legitimatethroughout the society. However, timing is critical. TheChinese crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989 andthe anticipated handover to China in 1997 worried HongKong leaders and citizens concerned about protection forindividual rights (Petersen 1996; Chan 1995:27). At this

merry and stern The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong F 389

historical juncture, human rights were an importantsource of what Kevin O’Brien terms “rightful resistance”(1996). By citing the gulf between international normsand the situation in Hong Kong, the women and theirallies gained both legitimacy and public support.

Our research on the movement relies on ethnographicstudies done at the time of the movement and subse-quent field research in 2002–3, including interviews withmany of the protagonists. These interviews took placenearly ten years after the movement. While they pro-vided insight into how people saw the issue, we haverelied heavily on secondary sources to reconstruct atimeline of events. Eliza Chan’s (1995) master’s thesisin anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kongwas particularly valuable because Chan spent significanttime with the indigenous women during the movementand placed emphasis on how they perceived events atthe time. It was Chan’s insightful analysis of the differ-ence between the way indigenous women saw the move-ment and the way it was understood by others thatstarted us on a further exploration of the female inher-itance movement as a way of understanding the processof localizing human rights.

The Female Inheritance Movement

The central actors in the female inheritance movementare people labeled “indigenous,” a term used in HongKong to describe the descendants of the population livingin the New Territories at the time of the British colonialtakeover in 1899. In anthropology, the term “indige-nous” is usually used to refer to relatively homogeneousgroups that were the initial inhabitants of a territory andhave now been incorporated into larger national states.They often occupy a subordinate status within the state.In contrast, the New Territories is an ethnically diverseregion that has experienced continuous immigration andsettlement of various ethnic groups, largely Cantonese,Hakka, and Punti, over a long period of time (see Watson1985). Groups typically claim indigenous identity on thebasis of prior residence, custom, and community and usethese claims as the basis for entitlements to land andresources. Thus, indigeneity is a political claim as wellas a cultural status. In the Hong Kong context, “indig-enous” was a label first imposed by the British and lo-cally adopted to differentiate those with pre-1899 rootsfrom more recent urban arrivals.

The catalyst for the movement was an indigenouswoman, Lai-sheung Cheng, who became a key leader bytracking down other aggrieved women in the New Ter-ritories and contacting Hong Kong women’s groups topush their claims. When Ms. Cheng’s father died withouta will (a common occurrence in the New Territories),3

3. Wills are considered bad luck in traditional Chinese culture be-cause of their association with death. For this reason, wills detailingthe division of property are rare. However, men occasionally leave“voice from the grave” wills that exhort family members to behavewell or give a widow permission to remarry (Selby 1991:72–73; seealso Wong 2000:173).

her two brothers inherited his house in Yuen Long. InMay 1991 the brothers decided to sell the house to adeveloper. Ms. Cheng was still living on the second floorof the house, and she refused to leave unless she wasgiven a share of the proceeds from the sale, citing a Qing-Dynasty custom allowing unmarried women to resideindefinitely in the family’s home after a father’s death(South China Morning Post, August 23, 1993, and Chenginterview, 2003). For the next two years she was harassedby the buyer of the house to force her to leave. The buyerroutinely broke into the house, once smearing excrementand urine around the interior and on another occasionreleasing mice (Sunday Telegraph, October 24, 1993, andCheng interview, 2003). The harassment was so intensethat Ms. Cheng said she had to call the police nearlyevery night.

Fed up, Ms. Cheng decided to make her story public.Her first step was to write a letter to Chris Patten, thengovernor of Hong Kong, saying, “I was persecuted be-cause of the law” (Cheng interview, 2003). Not contentwith alerting Governor Patten, she wrote a letter to theChinese newspaper Oriental Daily explaining her situ-ation. The Oriental Daily did not publish the letter, butsomeone at the paper put Ms. Cheng in touch with LindaWong, a social worker at the Hong Kong Federation ofWomen’s Centres who was known to the staff becauseher organization was lobbying hard for a women’s com-mission (Wong interview, 2003). Ms. Cheng told LindaWong that she knew several other indigenous women ina similar situation, including Ying Tang, a patient at Ms.Cheng’s Chinese-medicine clinic. She also said that sev-eral women had contacted her after they saw her nameand story in a Chinese newspaper, the Wah Kui Daily.Ms. Wong asked Ms. Cheng to contact these women andbring them to a meeting, which she did in late 1993(Wong interview, 2003). After this first meeting, thewomen began to publicize their stories. They met in-formally with various government officials, includingmembers of the Hong Kong Legislative Council AnnaWu and Christine Loh, to explore their legal options.Their first formal step was a meeting at the ComplaintsDivision of the Office of Members of the LegislativeCouncil (Wong interview, 2003).

Framing the Issue

As the indigenous women were organizing, prohibitionof female inheritance in the New Territories was gainingprominence as a political issue. On the most basic level,the conflict over female inheritance stemmed from HongKong’s dual legal system regarding land. While HongKong Island and Kowloon, the two other regions of HongKong, are governed by laws and a legal system importedfrom Britain, the New Territories fall under the 1910New Territories Ordinance, which recognizes Chinesecustomary law. Although the original legislation makesit sound as if courts had the option of using Chinesecustomary law to resolve land cases (“the courts havethe power to enforce Chinese custom or customary


right”), the Tang v Tang decision (1970) established thatapplication of Chinese custom to New Territories landcases was mandatory (Selby 1991:48; see also Loh 1997).As a result, there were two laws governing inheritancein Hong Kong in 1994: one in urban Hong Kong andanother in the rural New Territories.

Discrimination against New Territories women hadbeen on the radar screen of women’s groups for a longtime. When the Association for the Advancement ofFeminism (AAF) was founded in 1984, abolishing dis-criminatory laws in the New Territories was mentionedin its position paper (Tong 1999:64). In addition, fivewomen’s groups asked the government to set up a work-ing group to look into New Territories discrimination inJuly 1990 (Howarth et al. 1991:17). The issue of femaleinheritance took on increased importance after a 1991shadow report by the Hong Kong Council of Womenprepared in conjunction with Hong Kong’s report to theHuman Rights Committee in Geneva on compliancewith the International Covenant on Civil and PoliticalRights (ICCPR).

NGO reports on UN treaties tend to vanish into theether of documents surrounding UN work. However,this particular submission came at a high point of in-terest in human rights in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s Billof Rights had been passed in July 1991,4 and in the wakeof the events in Tiananmen Square Hong Kong wasnewly concerned with civil liberties and discrimination(Petersen 1996; see also Petersen and Samuels 2002:47–48). Although the Heung Yee Kuk, a political orga-nization representing rural villages, had lobbied to ex-empt “traditional rights” of male villagers from the Billof Rights, it had failed to win an exemption (Petersen1996:353–55).5 As a result, the Hong Kong Council ofWomen’s report was able to claim that this was a formof gender discrimination that contravened the newlypassed Bill of Rights (Howarth et al. 1991:16).

The shadow report was important because it framedthe female inheritance issue in human rights terms. Thefour authors, all Western women with strong academicbackgrounds, argued that male-only inheritance violatedboth the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimi-nation Against Women (CEDAW) and the ICCPR (Ho-

4. There were calls for a Bill of Rights prior to 1989, but the proposalwas not endorsed by the government until after Tiananmen (Pe-tersen 1996:350). In a tricky bit of legislation drafting, Hong Kong’sBill of Rights was modeled on the ICCPR to make it harder to repealafter the handover. China had already agreed in the Joint Decla-ration (the document outlining the terms of the handover) that theICCPR would remain in force.5. The Heung Yee Kuk, founded in 1926, has acted as a leader inprotecting the interests of indigenous villagers, particularly withreference to land, and is the highest tier of the representative or-ganization of the villagers (Chan 2003:67, 87). Kuk members consistof the chair and vice chair of each of 27 rural committees made upof representatives elected by their villages (Asian Television Net-work, February 27, 2001). These conservative clan leaders have inthe past opposed development, but since the late 1950s they havestopped doing so and sought to increase compensation for land fromthe government (Chan 2003:71).

warth et al. 1991:12).6 They further explained that HongKong’s legislation governing succession—the Intestates’Estate Ordinance and the Probate and AdministrationOrdinance—did not apply to New Territories women (p.14). The report included a well-reasoned argument as towhy male-only inheritance was not protected by eitherthe Joint Declaration or the Basic Law, the two docu-ments outlining the terms of the handover (pp. 16–17).These legal arguments provided the critical intellectualframework for activists and legislators to push for equalinheritance. They also helped clear up confusion aboutthe complicated dual legal system. The governmentcould no longer claim, as the attorney general did in1986, that they were “not aware of any provisions of[Hong Kong] law which discriminate against women”(quoted in Lui 1997: chap. 3, 5). The report called male-only inheritance a “feudal” result of a patriarchal Con-fucian social order and noted that it persisted in HongKong long after its abolition in China, Taiwan, and Sin-gapore because the New Territories Ordinance had “ledto a rigidification of customary law” (pp. 13, 15, 17).

The most important contribution of the report, how-ever, was its discovery that the jurisdiction of the NewTerritories Ordinance was based on territory, not on in-digenous identity, and therefore its prohibition of femaleinheritance applied to all residents of the New Territo-ries. In 1994, 42% of the population of Hong Kong livedin the New Territories (Tong 1999:53). Most of the peoplelived in public housing estates or private flats that werenot exempted from the New Territories Ordinance. Asa result, women were ineligible to inherit propertythroughout most of the New Territories (Petersen 1996:341; Jones interview, 2003).7 Amazingly, practically noone had realized this. The news of this discovery brokein the Chinese newspaper Ming Pao on September 6,1993, and immediately created a crisis for the govern-ment (Wong 2000:299; see also Fischler 2000:215).8 The340,000 owners of apartments and houses in urban partsof the New Territories suddenly discovered that Chinesecustomary law applied to them (Home Affairs Branch1993). Clearly, the New Territories Ordinance wouldhave to be amended to allow female urban residents toinherit property when the owner died intestate, follow-ing the laws in place in urban Hong Kong.

On November 19, 1993, the government introducedthe New Territories Land (Exemption) Bill. The bill ex-

6. The Hong Kong Council of Women was formed in 1947. Becauseof an explosion in the number of local women’s groups during the1980s, membership in the early 1990s was limited to a small num-ber of expatriate women.7. The Hong Kong Council of Women also discovered that womenhad once been permitted to administer New Territories propertyafter the death of a husband, father, or son, but 1971 changes tothe laws governing inheritance had eliminated this possibility(Carol Jones, personal communication, October 14, 2003).8. By the time the news broke, the Hong Kong Council of Womenhad already informed the government of the problem. In June 1993the government started automatically exempting all new grants oflands (with the exception of land grants to indigenous villagers)from the New Territories Ordinance (South China Morning Post,March 11, 1994).


empted urban land, land generally inhabited by HongKong residents who had moved into the New Territories,from the New Territories Ordinance. This change wasnot contested by the rural political leaders or the gov-ernment. It was only when a legislator proposed extend-ing the right to inherit family land to rural indigenouswomen that a wave of protest erupted. Giving ruralwomen the right to inherit family land was a dramaticdeparture from a practice dating back at least a hundredyears. The first step in making this momentous changecame with the creation of the Anti-Discrimination Fe-male Indigenous Residents Committee.

The Anti-Discrimination Female IndigenousResidents Committee

On October 3, 1993, the indigenous women lodged theircomplaint with the Complaints Division of the Legis-lative Council. Less than a week later, the LegislativeCouncil passed a nonbinding motion calling for femaleinheritance in the New Territories (South China Morn-ing Post, October 14, 1993). Despite two hours of fiercedebate, the motion passed easily, with 36 in favor andonly 4 opposed. The Anti-Discrimination Female Indig-enous Residents Committee was founded about the timeof this debate (Wong 2000:299; Chan 1995:47). In addi-tion to the indigenous women, it included Linda Wong,a representative of the AAF, a Radio Television HongKong reporter, an anthropology graduate student, and alabor organizer.9 With the help of these outsiders, theindigenous women began to tell their stories to a wideraudience. Most important, they learned to tell these sto-ries in a way that was politically effective.

In the beginning, the women saw their situations aspersonal wrongs perpetrated by particular relatives andstressed that they had been denied affection by their na-tal and marital relatives (Chan 1995:72). According toLinda Wong, the women were not thinking about chang-ing the law until the first demonstration outside the Leg-islative Council. Rather, they were hoping that Legis-lative Council members would address their individualcases (interview, 2003).10 Chan (1995) argues that mostof the women saw their claims in terms of kinship ob-ligations, not equal rights. Most of the women did notcriticize the patrilineal kinship system itself but blamedparticular relatives who had reneged on their kinshipobligations to provide them financial and emotional sup-port in lieu of their fathers’ land. One woman inter-viewed by Chan was most angry that her relatives hadfailed to keep in touch with her, forgetting that she washer fathers’ “root and sprout” and “flesh and blood.” If

9. The exact number of members of the Residents Committee isunclear. Chan (1995:39) cites six active members, although one isa news reporter without a grievance. Wong and Chan (interview,2003) list seven core members. Most likely, there was some fluxover time.10. This is a matter of dispute. In a 2003 interview Ms. Chengclaimed that the women knew that the law had to be changed fromthe start.

she had inherited, she said, she would have allowed herrelatives to live in her father’s house as long as theymaintained close ties with her (pp. 88–89).

When the women did make inheritance claims, theyjustified them on the basis of their filial ties to theirfather and sought to assert their membership in the lin-eage (Chan 1995:39). In telling their stories, several ofthe women emphasized the role they had played in theirfathers’ funerals to underscore their close ties to theirfathers (pp. 82–85). Because they had been filial, affec-tionate daughters, they argued, they were entitled to in-herit.11 By using kinship ties to justify inheritance, theyreinforced the patrilineal family system even as they as-serted their rights (p. 97). Tellingly, only one of thewomen in the Anti-Discrimination Female IndigenousResidents Committee had a brother. The rest of thewomen were all “last-of-line” daughters (juefangnu) and,as a result, their fathers’ land had been inherited by dis-tant male relatives.12 In Chan’ s interviews, most of thewomen said they would have been willing to give uptheir inheritance rights if they had had brothers (Chan1995:72). Regardless, many villagers criticized them forbehaving unreasonably in demanding a share of their na-tal family’s property (p. 39). As the women began lob-bying for a change in the law, they came under pressurefor being “ungrateful” and for being “collaborators” withthe Westernized “outsiders” (p. 126).

Through the Anti-Discrimination Female IndigenousResidents Committee, the indigenous women learnedhow to translate their kinship grievances into the lan-guage of rights and equality. This translation was criticalbecause, in order to be politically persuasive, the womenneeded to phrase their needs in a language acceptable tothose hearing their claims (Chan 1995:56). The Legis-lative Council and the media were interested not in fam-ily disputes over property but in stories that spoke towider themes of gender equality and human rights. Thewomen had to “learn” to put on an “elitist and rationalpose,” to present themselves as victims with a “de-tached” attitude, in language devoid of personal griev-ances and emotions (p. 100).

Although the Hong Kong Federation of Women’s Cen-tres claimed that the “women took all the initiatives bythemselves while the Centre just concentrated on pro-viding resources support,” the process was more com-plicated (Hong Kong Federation of Women’s Centres1994):20; see also Lui 1997: chap. 4, 20). Chan describeshow outsiders on the Residents Committee played animportant role in framing the indigenous women’s sto-ries and, more generally, facilitating the transition to amore generalized, rights-based perspective (1995:119).The social workers drilled the women, teaching them

11. In some cases, affection and kinship were valid criteria for fe-male inheritance. Chan (1997:155–59) discusses a case from the1970s in which a village council ruled that a daughter could becometrustee of her father’s land because she was the person closest toher father.12. All Chinese terms are in Mandarin. For a more extended dis-cussion of what it means to be a “last-of-line” daughter, see Chan(1995:40, 60–63).


not to use slang and how to present themselves to thepublic (p. 120). They learned to ask for a broad changeto an unfair law rather than mediation and a more equaldivision of property. On several occasions the outsidersin the group groomed the women in dealing with themedia, particularly in how to respond to reporters. Theemphasis, beyond avoiding slang and speaking with suf-ficient detachment, was on keeping the women’s storiesshort and quotable. They wanted the women to reiteratea standard claim rather than telling their personal storiesso that the movement did not appear to be motivatedonly by personal interest (p. 117). The women practicedresponding to questions such as “There are some womenin the New Territories who say that they do not needthe rights of inheritance. Why do you still insist on it?”and “What experience of yours in the New Territoriesaroused you to speak out so boldly?” pp. 117–19; see alsoChan interview, 2003, and Cheng interview, 2003). Inone session, the social worker imitated the tone of thereporters in asking this question and taped the responsegiven by one of the women. She then played the tape forthe group to illustrate the power of placing an individualstory in a wider context. For one woman, the principleof gender equality and human rights enabled her to claiminheritance even though her natal kin claimed that shewas only an adopted, not a biological daughter (pp.119–20). Under the human rights framework, she hadrights regardless of her adopted status.

In addition, the Residents Committee helped thewomen branch out into different modes of expression,creating dramas and songs to illustrate the injustice ofmale-only inheritance. A labor organizer in the groupbecame the “stage director” for the drama. As one in-terviewee put it, “She put together elements to strikethose cameras,” such as suggesting that the women dressin traditional clothes (Chan interview, 2003; see alsoCheng interview, 2003). As part of this dramatization,the women needed to present a united front regardlessof differences in age, ethnicity, and education. They hadto negotiate a common identity as indigenous women,an identity forged through a series of small decisionswithin the group. When the women rewrote a traditionalsong to include new lyrics about injustice, for example,they had to find a song that everyone knew. In the end,they chose a Hakka mountain song (shan ge) even thoughthe majority of the indigenous women were not Hakka(Cheng interview, 2003).

In creating the dramas, the organizers were respondingto the stereotypes that they knew the media wanted tosee. The media had long seen the New Territories as abastion of outdated tradition. In a documentary on NewTerritories life entitled An Indigenous Village: A Casefor Concern, aired on Radio Television Hong Kong June20 1986, the narrator closed with the thought that “tra-ditional modes of thinking vastly out of step with themodern world are still deep-rooted in the hearts of in-digenous villagers in the New Territories.” During thefemale inheritance movement, the Kuk was portrayedas traditional, rural, and male while the female inheri-tance coalition was urban, modern, and female (Chan

1995:50). For the most part, the indigenous women wereseen as victims of “tradition” and lineage hegemony (p.100). One TV series broadcast during the movement de-picted the lineage system as a “living fossil” of Chinesetradition (p. 107). Other reporters posed the women infront of ancestral halls staring into the distance, usingthe elegant Chinese calligraphy as a foil for the women’sapparent helplessness (p. 103). The press encouraged thewomen to wear the loose-fitting black suits and large-brimmed hats traditionally associated with rural women,a departure from their normal attire (p. 53).

Indigenous women who failed to generalize their par-ticular grievances into stories of rights violations weresilenced (Chan 1995:131–32). In the middle of one Leg-islative Council debate, for example, an indigenouswoman, the oldest participant in the movement, sud-denly interrupted the chairperson and started shoutingin Hakka about how badly her relatives had treated her.The chairperson cut the woman off, saying, “Your storyis not related to our discussion.” A representative of theKuk then told her that her story was just a family disputeand should be filed with the Kuk (pp. 131–32). Portrayingthe women’s stories as individual disputes withoutbroader significance was an important way of discred-iting the indigenous women (p. 5). During the debate overthe passage of the land exemption bill, one legislatordismissed the indigenous women by saying, “As regardsthe case of Ms. Cheng Lai-Sheung . . . her family mem-bers have already clarified publicly that it was only amatter of dispute on fighting for legacy” (Hong KongHansard 1994:4553).

In contrast, the women’s stories were very effectivewhen filtered through the lens developed in the Anti-Discrimination Female Indigenous Residents Commit-tee and presented as examples of gender inequality. So-cial movement scholars have noted the degree to whichindividual testimonials can help legitimate a cause and,by extension, rally support behind it (Keck and Sikkink1998:19–20). In the female inheritance movement, thewomen’s stories played a critical role in giving a humanface to the problem and discrediting the Kuk’s claim thatit was the sole voice of indigenous villagers. During theOctober 1993 motion debate, several of the legislativecouncillors mentioned having met the indigenouswomen and having been moved by the women’s stories.These women’s stories also refuted Kuk claims that noone complained about male-only inheritance (HongKong Hansard 1993:249, 253, 256).

It would be easy to believe that the indigenous womenlost control of their stories and were exploited for polit-ical change, as has occurred elsewhere (Keck and Sikkink1998:20). The reality, however, is more nuanced. Whilethe outsiders on the Residents Committee helped thewomen present themselves to the outside world, thewomen themselves played an active role in shaping thestrategy. The idea of writing new lyrics for indigenoussongs, for example, came from the women (Chan 1995:108; see also Cheng interview, 2003). The idea was apublic relations coup: the image of indigenous womensinging traditional songs became an icon of the move-


ment. The women also had a voice in the wider women’smovement through the chairperson of the ResidentsCommittee, Ms. Cheng, who attended meetings of a co-alition of women’s groups. Perhaps most important, thewomen spoke for themselves. While the outside mem-bers of the Residents Committee coached the women,they also felt strongly that the women should have theirown voice (Chan 1995:117; see also Wong interview,2003).

As the indigenous women learned to tell their storiesdifferently, they moved from framing their problems askinship violations to presenting them as a product ofdiscrimination and gender inequality. This shift in con-sciousness seems to have been an additive process. Al-though the women developed a new perception of theproblem as gender discrimination, they retained their oldsense of individual wrongs perpetrated by male relatives.Consciousness is slippery and unquantifiable, and it isdifficult to know how completely the indigenous womenassimilated the gender-equality framework. One womantold her story using terms such as “gender discrimina-tion” and “injustice,” for example, terms that she hadnot known before joining the Residents Committee(Chan 1995:146). The Hakka mountain song that thewomen developed also refers to injustice. The first twolines of the song show an awareness that the indigenouswomen stand together as an oppressed group with com-mon concerns: “Female indigenous women are the mostunfortunate people / This world is unfair to them” (p.98). The second two lines go farther, asking the Legis-lative Council to address the problem and, by implica-tion, change the law: “The Hong Kong society is unjust/ I hope that the Legislative Councillors will uphold jus-tice” (p. 98).

Yet the Hakka song does not mention rights, and thereis little evidence that the indigenous women developeda sustained critique of their problems based on humanrights. Despite one woman’s statement that “now andafter [the handover in] 1997, I will continue to bravelystand up and fight for the rights of indigenous women,”the indigenous women dropped out of the women’smovement after the land exemption ordinance waspassed (Hong Kong Women Christian Council 1995:126;see also interviews). No doubt they were tired of fighting,but this may also be a sign that their concerns wererooted in their particular problems with uncooperativemale relatives rather than a larger struggle for genderequality. The women’s frustration with demonstrationsthat did not focus exclusively on them is another signthat the rights perspective never entirely replaced thekinship-violation frame. Moreover, Chan reports thatsome of the women were upset when their stories weresubsumed by the larger themes of gender equality or an-tidiscrimination (1995:116, 146).

Passage of the Bill

After the initial debate and the formation of the Anti-Discrimination Female Indigenous Residents Commit-

tee, events began unfolding rapidly. Inside the LegislativeCouncil, Christine Loh took up the female inheritancecause for the rural indigenous women. Loh, educated inboth Hong Kong and England, says that the issue ap-pealed to her because she thought it was “very odd” thatindigenous women had “less rights” than everyone elsein Hong Kong (interview, 2003). On January 31, 1994,she submitted an amendment to extend the land ex-emption ordinance to include rural land. If passed, itwould have allowed female indigenous women to inheritfamily property, although not the ancestral trust landsheld by lineages.

For a few months after Loh submitted her amendment,things were quiet. The Heung Yee Kuk, relying on old-style colonial politics, ignored the issue because it as-sumed that the amendment would never receive gov-ernment support. But on March 10 the governmentannounced that it would not oppose Loh’s amendment.This was a turning point, particularly because it had ini-tially seemed that extending female inheritance to in-digenous women would be an uphill battle. While theoutcome seems inevitable in retrospect, the colonial gov-ernment had long courted the support of the Kuk to en-sure that rural development was not met with seriousresistance, and many thought the government wouldcontinue to back it on the inheritance issue. In fact, itis not clear why the colonial government had a changeof heart. Some Kuk members felt that the governmenthad sold them out because it no longer required Kuksupport to develop the New Territories (South ChinaMorning Post, March 27, 1993). The Kuk’s pro-Beijingstance and opposition to Governor Patten’s political re-forms may also have played a role (South China MorningPost, March 27, 1993).

In response to the change in the government’s posi-tion, the Kuk organized a rally on March 22 attended byover 1,200 supporters (South China Morning Post, March23, 1993). At 3:50 p.m., 20 incensed indigenous villagersbroke through security barriers during a protest outsidethe Legislative Council building. They attacked peopledemonstrating for equal inheritance rights, ripped upbanners, threw water bottles, and shouted curses (SouthChina Morning Post, March 23, 1994; see also Tse in-terview, 2003). Lee Wing-tat, a legislative councillorcaught in the fray, fell to the ground after a punch to theback. After March 22, both sides realized the strength ofthe opposition and the scale of the fight ahead of them.At that point, 12 women’s groups formed the Coalitionfor Equal Inheritance Rights to fight for rural women’sinheritance rights in the New Territories (Tong 1999:55–56).13 Three days later, the Kuk formed the Head-

13. The Coalition included the following groups: Anti-Discrimi-nation Female Residents Committee, Hong Kong Federation ofWomen’s Centres, Association for the Advancement of Feminism,Hong Kong Women Christian Council, Women’s Rights ConcernGroup of the Chan Hing Social Service Centre, Hong Kong WomenWorkers Association, AWARE, Hong Kong Council of Women, Busi-ness and Professional Women, the Hong Kong Federation ofWomen, and two other community groups (Tong 1999:64–65; seealso Wong 2000:62).


quarters for the Protection for the Village and Defenseof the Clan (p. 58). For the next three months, these twogroups worked hard to gain support, holding frequentdemonstrations and facing off dozens of times.

In both the March 22 rally and subsequent demon-strations, the Kuk positioned itself as the defender oftradition and culture.14 Traditionally, women left theirhome village and became part of their husbands’ lin-eages. Allowing female inheritance, the Kuk argued,would lead to a disintegration of clan identity becauseland would eventually be owned by nonlineage members(Chan 1998:45). To buttress its claim, it appealed to theauthority of the ancestors. Male-only inheritance is “inaccordance with the wishes of [the] ancestors” and, as aresult, “any outsider tampering with these customs shallnot be tolerated” (Heung Yee Kuk Proclamation, quotedin Chan 1998:45). In order for this claim to be seen aslegitimate, the male-dominated Kuk realized that itwould need the support of indigenous women. It foundwomen who agreed with Angela Li York-lan: “[We] donot think we are discriminated against. We love ourtraditions. We have the right not to accept any change”(South China Morning Post, April 4, 1994). At one dem-onstration, the Kuk vice chairman, Daniel Lam, said,“We have shown the community that villagers are ableto demonstrate endurance, calm and reason in the fightagainst the destruction of our customs” (Hong KongStandard, April 12, 1994).

As defenders of tradition, the Kuk placed emphasis onbeing Chinese. One song often sung at demonstrationswas “The Brave Chinese,” renamed “The Brave NewTerritories People” (Chan 1998:47). Being Chinese meantrenewing attention to the anticolonial strands of indig-enous history. In April 1994, 1,000 villagers gathered tocommemorate an 1899 uprising against the British at TaiPo (p. 45; see also South China Morning Post, April 18,1994). Ironically, it was the first time the uprising hadever been publicly commemorated (p. 46). Kuk demon-strations lent themselves to dramatic media coverage.The inheritance issue remained in the public eye fromOctober 1993 (the motion debate) through June 1994 (thepassage of the bill) because Kuk members did things suchas beheading a doll representing Governor Patten (SouthChina Morning Post, April 18, 1994). On another occa-sion, angry villagers threatened to rape Loh if she daredset foot in the New Territories (South China MorningPost, March 26, 1994). When it came to media attention,Loh said, “One couldn’t have better opponents than theHeung Yee Kuk” (interview, 2003).

Although there were times when the outcome of Loh’samendment was unclear, the issue was pretty much set-tled by May 1994. The public overwhelmingly supportedfemale inheritance rights, by a margin of 77% in favorto 9% opposed (South China Morning Post, May 9,

14. This appeal to tradition is an old argument. Defenders of thepractice of keeping concubines argued that it was “an institution. . . sanctioned by immemorial Chinese law and customs; it hasbeen preserved by the Colony’s Charter; it has received the highestjudicial recognition” (quoted in Lee 2000:232).

1994).15 There was little sympathy for the Heung YeeKuk both because people generally believed in genderequality and because they were resentful of what theysaw as the special privileges granted to indigenous vil-lagers. Recognizing the extent of public support for ex-tending female inheritance rights from urban women inthe New Territories to indigenous women, the govern-ment incorporated Loh’s amendment into its own bill,along with suggestions from several other legislativecouncillors (Tsang and Wan 1994:13). On May 24, 1994,the Bills Committee of the Legislative Council acceptedthe government’s amended bill and voted down HeungYee Kuk Chairman Lau Wong-fat’s suggestion of a ref-erendum in the New Territories to settle the issue (Tsangand Wan 1994:12). By the time of the actual vote on June22, the result was a foregone conclusion. The New Ter-ritories Land (Exemption) Ordinance passed easily, with36 votes in favor, 2 against, and 3 abstentions (Hong KongHansard 1994:4656).

Creating Custom: The History Behind theDebate

The female inheritance movement is full of deep ironiesabout the meanings of tradition and modernity. Mostbasically, it was a struggle over land rights and politicalpower in which powerful male leaders claimed to be de-fending culture, tradition, and the lineage while poorindigenous women and their elite urban allies claimedto speak for gender equality and universal human rights.Yet this dichotomy between tradition and modernity wasa constructed truth, created both by the protagonists andby the historical legacy of colonialism.

colonial roots

Hong Kong’s dual legal system was the result of the un-usual circumstances under which the British gained con-trol of the New Territories. In contrast to Hong KongIsland and Kowloon, which were ceded to Britain in per-petuity, the terms of the 1899 Convention of Pekingspecified that the New Territories would be leased toBritain for 99 years. This was the lease that expired onJuly 1, 1997, when Hong Kong (including Hong KongIsland and Kowloon) was handed back to China. Thelimited scope of Britain’s right to rule was one reason topreserve local custom as much as possible (Petersen1996:339; Jones 1995:167–70). After gaining control ofthe New Territories, the British issued a number of proc-lamations assuring New Territories villagers that theNew Territories would be “governed . . . according tothe laws, customs and usages of the Chinese by the eldersof villages, subject to the control of the British magis-trate” (quoted in Chan 1999:234). The 1899 Blake Proc-lamation, often cited as the grounds for deference to Chi-nese custom, further reassured villagers that “your

15. This was a survey of all of Hong Kong.


usages and good customs will not in any way be inter-fered with” (Lockhart 1900:appendix no. 9). Before WorldWar II, villagers were governed by local elders accordingto Chinese custom and law with a British district officerto resolve disputes.

This strategy was dictated by economics and a desireto avoid conflict. Remembering the expensive andbloody 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India, British colonialadministrators decided that adherence to Chinese cus-tomary law in the New Territories was the best way toensure local support for colonialism at minimal cost(Chiu and Hung 2000:226; see also Jones 1995:168). Be-cause the British never believed that the New Territorieswould be particularly profitable (Chun 2000:48), theysaw the New Territories villagers in terms of culture andkinship, not as potential laborers. In contrast to HongKong Island, which saw rapid change, the New Terri-tories villages were treated as bearers of tradition, iso-lated and expected not to change. For many colonial ad-ministrators, preserving village life became a romanticgoal (Jones 1995:180). Until urbanization and industri-alization hit the New Territories in the 1970s and 1980s,the area was seen as “a virtual laboratory for the studyof rural Chinese society” (Watson 1983:486).

The New Territories were dominated by powerfulpatrilineages, corporate groups that traced membershipthrough male descent. While multilineage villages didexist, most males in a community could trace their fam-ily back to a common ancestor. The members of thepatrilineage had common land, held celebrations to wor-ship common ancestors, and cooperated for political pur-poses (Watson 1983:486). In contrast to the situation inthe rest of Hong Kong, it was permissible in the NewTerritories to make gifts of land to ancestral trusts inperpetuity. In 1948 about one-third of the land was heldin such ancestral trusts, with sale permitted only by allbeneficiaries (Strickland Report 1953:62). The female in-heritance dispute focused not on lands held in ancestraltrusts but on family lands.

Despite a common belief that patrilineages were uni-fied corporate groups, there was considerable inequalityin the villages and within lineages. Watson’s (1985) care-ful ethnographic study from the 1970s reveals that small-holder tenants were heavily dependent on their wealthyagnates.16 These two classes were quite distinct, withdifferent forms of marriage, levels of education, kinds ofhouses, and social lives for wives and daughters. Al-though it was important for the lineage to present itselfas a unified corporation to the outside world and to itsmembers, it existed in a highly stratified society. More-

16. In a New Territories region that Watson studied, a small mer-chant and landowning elite headed lineages made up of tenant farm-ers (1985:54). The landlord-merchants controlled crucial resourcessuch as land, ancestral estates, markets, pawnshops, boats for cargo,and factories. They employed fellow lineage members as well asoutsiders in their many enterprises (p. 81). James Hayes notes that“Watson mainly worked with the oldest, biggest lineages and classdivisions were less marked in the majority of New Territories lin-eages, many of which were quite small” (personal communication,October 2003).

over, during the last quarter of the twentieth century,inheritance patterns slowly started changing. Local law-yers sometimes found ways around the ban on women’sinheritance of family land, particularly if the village headwas supportive. In the absence of a male heir, widowsor daughters occasionally inherited land or acquired thecash after the properties were sold (Chan 1997:169).Sometimes a woman could keep land if she did not re-marry. Her position was, in essence, “trustee for life”(Selby 1991:73).

defining custom

Since Chinese custom was not codified, it was typicallyinterpreted by British magistrates serving in the NewTerritories and the courts (see, e.g., Coates 1956, Wesley-Smith 1994). For colonial administrators, preserving lo-cal customs meant identifying them, a problematic pro-cess. Despite references to homogeneous “Chinesecustoms,” there was variation in customs among lin-eages, villages, and districts (Wesley-Smith 1994:218;Strickland Report 1953:13). No doubt overwhelmed bythis diversity, the British began an effort to record Chi-nese customs in 1899. The result was a particularly ide-alized version of Chinese custom because their inform-ants were mostly village elders and scholars, men—theywere all men—with an interest in preserving the statusquo (Chan 1999:236). District officers developed a “bi-ble” of points of custom, which they passed on to others.Coupled with testimony from expert witnesses alive in1899, these notes were used by British district officersto resolve land disputes according to traditional Chineselaw until they were lost in the 1941–44 Japanese occu-pation (Wesley-Smith 1994:206).

This was an ironic situation. Despite their confessedignorance, British district officers functioned as uphold-ers of Chinese tradition.17 Perhaps as a result of uncer-tainty, district officers tended to be conservative, withthe result that adherence to Chinese law and customwas reinforced and solidified (Wesley-Smith 1994:206,222–23). The additional irony is that other Chinese so-cieties, such as Taiwan and Mainland China, reformedChinese law and custom to allow equal inheritance. Byrefusing to allow this kind of change, the British frozeNew Territories life in a mythic, imagined past. Thismodel of colonial administration worked in the prewarera because the New Territories were still largely rural.In 1931 the population of the New Territories was98,000. Most residents were still farmers, and districtofficers could hear most disputes (Watson 1983:484).Most important, the New Territories were isolatedenough from urban Hong Kong to maintain a different

17. On the bench there was a minority view that custom shouldbe allowed to change with the times. In a 1956 decision (WongYing-kuen v Wong Yi-shi and Ors) J. Briggs held that “the correctlaw to apply is the Qing law and custom as it existed in 1842 withsuch modifications in custom and in the interpretation in the lawas have taken place in Hong Kong since that period” (quoted inSelby 1991:50).


legal system and set of rights. This isolation ended inthe postwar era.

postwar changes: the end of village life

The end of World War II brought a wave of migrants fromChina. Residents who had fled Hong Kong during theJapanese occupation returned, accompanied by refugeesfrom the Chinese civil war. Between 1945 and 1950 thepopulation of Hong Kong jumped from 600,000 to be-tween 2 and 2.5 million, an increase of roughly 400%(Bray 2001:16; see also Chun 2000:111). This jump inpopulation created an intense need for new public hous-ing. After a 1953 fire in the Shek Kip Mei squatter com-munity, the Hong Kong government decided to buildpublic housing on a massive scale. Urban Hong Kongwas already overcrowded, so the new public housing es-tates had to be built in the New Territories. The gov-ernment built seven New Towns in the New Territories,each of which included industry, public housing, com-munity services, and infrastructure (Scott 1982:660).

This development was tremendously disruptive to ru-ral life. In the most direct measure of disruption, about50 villages were physically moved to make room for theNew Towns and another 25 villages were moved in orderto create reservoirs to meet the water needs of the ex-panding urban population (Hayes 2001:72). Not surpris-ingly, the old district officer system could not keep upwith population growth and the new burdens of NewTown administration. Starting in 1961, land disputecases were resolved by the courts; the district officerswere no longer “father mother officials” (fu mu guan)but pure administrators.

Most important, development changed the economyof the New Territories by creating new sources of wealth.Land for the New Towns was largely purchased fromNew Territories villagers, either with cash or through aland swap (Nissim 1998:102). Between 1984 and 1997,the period just before reunification with China, there wasa rapid increase in wealth based in part on the skyrock-eting value of real estate (Smart and Lee 2003:167; seealso Chan 2001:272). In 1993 one legislative councilorsaid, “When I was small, people were still talking about‘country people’ with ‘feet covered with cow dung’ and‘illiterate.’ But today we see that the members of theHeung Yee Kuk are all tycoons in smart suits and trav-eling in Rolls Royces” (Hong Kong Hansard 1993:240).The development value of land was part of a larger moveaway from an agricultural economy. Cheap rice importsfrom Thailand flooded Hong Kong in the 1950s. Ricefarming, the traditional occupation in the New Terri-tories, was suddenly unprofitable (Watson 1983:483).Some farmers switched to vegetables, but many othersdecided to emigrate. Suddenly, villages were transformedfrom physical communities based on a shared physicalspace to transnational communities based on sharedtraditions and birthplace (Chan 2001:280).18 As the rural

18. In a study of two villages, Watson (1985:150) found that one-third of the households had one or more members living abroad.

wealthy became absentee landlords, a group of new en-trepreneurs, distinct from the old elite of wealthy land-lord-merchants, emerged. The new entrepreneurs weresupported and nurtured by colonial officials because theywere more willing to cooperate with Hong Kong officialsin their development plans than the old elite (Watson1985:147–48). In addition, they tended to be less con-cerned with lineage unity (p. 148).

It was against this backdrop of urbanization, industri-alization, and dislocation that the rural women steppedforward to protest their inability to inherit land.

Layers and Translators: Theorizing theMovement

The story of how indigenous women came to demand achange in inheritance shows how international humanrights can be used to address local grievances. Yet thisis not a simple story of elite outsiders introducing orimposing rights language. Rather, rights language, me-diated through translators, was adopted, modified, sup-plemented, and ignored by the various participants. Here,we introduce four layers as a way of thinking about thedegree to which actors were tied to international rightslanguage. These four layers—expatriates, the LegislativeCouncil, women’s groups, and indigenous women—dif-fered significantly from each other in ideology, level ofeducation, extent of international travel, degree of in-ternational rights consciousness, and language.

expatriates

Expatriates played a critical role in bringing the femaleinheritance issue to prominence and framing it in rightsterms. Although it is difficult to remember in hindsight,there was no reason male-only inheritance had to be ad-dressed through legislative change. In 1993, five indig-enous women had applied for legal aid to sue for equalinheritance. They were denied legal aid, but their effortsshow that the inheritance issue could have been settledon a case-by-case basis by the courts instead of by leg-islative change (South China Morning Post, October 23,1993). Inheritance was resolved through legislation be-cause, in the course of preparing its ICCPR report, theHong Kong Council of Women discovered that femaleinheritance was illegal throughout the New Territories,not just in the villages (Jones interview, 2003).

After securing the necessity of changes to the NewTerritories Ordinance, expatriates lobbied for female in-heritance as a question of international law. The HongKong Council of Women’s report clearly stated thatmale-only inheritance “should have been declared un-lawful long ago, as [it is] contrary to Article 26 of theICCPR” and is “in conflict with the principle of equalitybetween sexes contained in the internationally acceptedDeclaration of Elimination of Discrimination AgainstWomen” (Howarth et al. 1991:16, 12). These expatriateswere primarily academics and lawyers, several of whom


dealt with international law professionally. They weremostly from the United States, Britain, or Australia andspoke English fluently, if not as a first language. On alocal-global continuum they were undeniably global, andthey saw denying women inheritance rights as a viola-tion of women’s right to protection from gender discri-mination.

the legislative council

The Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s national elite, sawfemale inheritance primarily as a choice between tra-dition and modernity. In the final debate over the landexemption ordinance, opponents of the bill claimed thatit would “attack the age-old fine tradition of the clansystem” and “disturb the peace in the countryside”(Hong Kong Hansard 1994:4579).19 Others sympatheticto the Kuk complained about the pace of change.20 In thewords of one legislator, “This is an attempt to changethe social customs of the indigenous population. Suchthinking will gradually be overtaken by newer concepts.In view of this, should we take the hasty move of en-forcing the changes through the legislative process?” (p.4544). Not even Kuk supporters, however, dared questionthe tenet of gender equality (Lee 2000:248). ChairmanLau Wong-fat maintained that the indigenous women“are not actually treated unequally. In fact, they are equalin other respects. Many of them may even often bullytheir husbands” (Hong Kong Hansard 1994:4559).

On the other side of the debate, supporters of the billargued that Hong Kong could not be an international cityas long as it had laws that discriminated against women.As one legislator put it, “Hong Kong is a prosperous andprogressive metropolis. The fact that the indigenouswomen of the New Territories are still openly discrim-inated against is a disgrace for the people of Hong Kong”(Hong Kong Hansard 1994:4565). Others made an explicitconnection between the Kuk’s rowdy behavior and sup-port for the land exemption ordinance: “When the 20thcentury is coming to a close, that someone should soshamelessly and overtly threaten to rape is indeed ashame on this modern international city of Hong Kong.Today members of this Council must use their vote toremove such a stigma on Hong Kong” (p. 4542).

Christine Loh, originally attracted to the issue becauseshe saw it in rights terms, continued to talk about equal-ity and human rights: “The idea of human rights is thatwe have to protect every individual’s basic right. Not tomention that there are 200 indigenous women complain-ing, even if there were only two of them, we as legislatorsstill have the responsibility of ensuring their equal right

19. This debate took place in both English and Cantonese, the twoofficial languages of Hong Kong.20. The Hong Kong Federation of Women, a conservative women’sgroup founded in 1993, also favored a more gradual approach: “Weaim at progress without upsetting stability” (Hong Kong Federationof Women 1994). Peggy Lam, a founding member of the federationas well as a legislative councillor, argued that haste to pass theamended land exemption ordinance had caused anxiety and conflictthat could have been avoided (Hong Kong Hansard 1994:4548–49).

before the law” (quoted in Lee 2000:250). Some legisla-tors also referred to international rights, echoing therhetoric used by the expatriate layer. Legislative Coun-cillor Anna Wu, herself a lawyer, was one of the first topick up the connection between female inheritance andinternational law. In a December 1993 letter to membersof the Bills Committee, she wrote: “The 1976 extensionof the ICCPR to Hong Kong and the 1991 enactment ofthe Bill of Rights Ordinance should have cast seriousdoubt on the continuing validity of the system estab-lished by the NTO (New Territories Ordinance)” (1994:1).

For legislators, there were two appealing aspects ofinternational law. First, international law could be usedto shame the government into action. In question-and-answer sessions with government representatives, Leg-islative Council members occasionally inquired aboutinternational covenants as a way of holding the govern-ment responsible to the ideals expressed in UN docu-ments (Hong Kong Hansard 1993:156–57, 159–60). Theother appealing aspect of international law was its per-ceived connection to modernity. In the debate over thepassage of the land exemption ordinance, LegislativeCouncillor Fung called it “both out of date and inappro-priate to deprive women of their land rights,” particu-larly because the Bill of Rights, the ICCPR, and CEDAWall stated that all citizens should be equal before the law(Hong Kong Hansard 1994:4547).

Most supporters of the bill were not much concernedabout the abolition of custom, perhaps because neitherthey nor their constituencies would be affected by thechange in law. “Outdated customs are a burden,” de-clared one legislator (Hong Kong Hansard 1993:139; seealso 1994:4542). However, Anna Wu was concerned thatthe ordinance would inadvertently abolish a positive tra-dition: women’s rights under Chinese customary law tomaintenance from the estate (see also Loh 1997:6). Al-though these customary rights were never enforced bythe courts, male relatives were traditionally responsiblefor the ongoing maintenance of widows and unmarrieddaughters. Ms. Cheng’s original complaint, for example,was that her brothers had violated Chinese custom byrefusing to allow her to stay in her father’s house. In aMarch 1993 letter to the members of the Bills Commit-tee, Wu expressed her concern that the bill would be“placing in jeopardy the welfare” of women “dependenton the residual customary obligations of the landowner”(1993:2). While not widely shared, her apprehensionshowed sensitivity to the strengths of the old system. Itsuggests that her vision of the problem bridged the per-spectives of the expatriate, national, and local groups.

women’s groups

In 1989, 20 women’s groups formed a coalition to lobbyfor a women’s commission and the extension of CEDAWto Hong Kong (Wong 2000:60–61). Until the Coalitionfor Equal Inheritance Rights was founded in March 1994,the women’s groups shared information and coordinatedaction on female inheritance through regular meetings


of this coalition. In contrast to the Legislative Councilor the expatriates, the coalition functioned entirely inCantonese. Like the wider women’s movement, it con-sisted primarily of middle-class, educated women, in-cluding students and social workers (see Tong n.d.:648).

The women’s groups conceptualized the female in-heritance issue mainly in terms of gender equality. T-shirts and banners from the movement often carried thelogo “�p�.” In keeping with this theme, one women’sgroup issued a statement that “based on the principle ofequality, land inheritance right is the right of every in-digenous inhabitant. If women inhabitants are not en-titled to it because of their gender, it is blatant discrim-ination, something we cannot accept” (quoted in Lee2000:250). The women’s groups treated gender equalityas a self-evident tenet and, for the most part, saw noneed to justify it in terms of law. When they did talkabout the law, women’s groups borrowed their argu-ments and even their language from the ICCPR report.One AAF publication directly quoted the report, sayingthat male-only inheritance rights “should have been de-clared unlawful long ago” (Association for the Advance-ment of Feminism 1993:14). Like the legislative coun-cillors, the women’s groups made an explicit connectionbetween gender equality and modernity. Male-only in-heritance was “archaic and out of step with society’sdevelopment.” The Hong Women Christian Councilwent so far as to say, “Gender equality is a shared goalof the modern world” (quoted in Wong 2000:192). Alongwith the legislative councillors, the women’s groups fo-cused on changing the law, not on providing solutionsfor individual women.

However, there were some important differences in per-spective between the women’s groups and the legislativecouncillors. The women’s groups saw male-only inheri-tance as a product of patriarchy, a strand of thought thatnever emerged in the Legislative Council.21 One groupaccused the Heung Yee Kuk of “patriarchal hegemony”(Wong 2000:192). Another suggested that the majority ofindigenous women were not aware of their oppressionbecause of “patriarchal socialization. . . . A harmony thatconceals injustice is not one to be applauded” (quoted inLee 2000:250–51). This critique of patriarchy was closelymixed with antifeudalism, a term associated with postre-volutionary thought in China. The term “feudalism”functioned as a kind of shorthand to connote backwardcustoms in need of change. During the rally outside theLegislative Council in connection with the October mo-tion debate, demonstrators shouted “Down with feudaltraditions!” (Hong Kong Standard, October 14, 1993). An-tifeudalism was the theme of the May 4, 1994, demon-stration outside the Legislative Council in honor ofChina’s May 4th movement (Cheung 1994:7). By “feudaltraditions” the women’s groups generally meant genderinequality, usually stemming from patriarchy. Male-onlysuccession was said to reinforce “the feudalistic idea that

21. Some later criticized the female inheritance movement becauseit failed to offer a fundamental challenge to patriarchy (Lui 1997:chap. 4, 22).

women are inferior to men” (Association for the Advance-ment of Feminism 1993:7). One women’s group wrote that“depending on fathers, husbands and children is exactlywhat the ‘three subordinations’ teaches in feudal society”and is in opposition “to the principle of independence forwomen” (quoted in Lee 2000:250).

In striving toward modernity and renouncing “back-ward” customs, women’s groups and legislative coun-cillors were drawing on themes familiar from twentieth-century Chinese history. Both May 4th reformers andCultural Revolution zealots fought against custom andfeudalism in the name of progress. Nevertheless, manyof the concepts used by the women’s groups—genderequality, human rights, and patriarchy—were appropri-ated from Western thought. Gender inequality based onthe critique of patriarchy is a standard feminist message,as familiar to the U.S. National Organization of Womenas to Hong Kong’s AAF. The women’s groups’ techniquesof activism—demonstrations, T-shirts, and banners—arealso familiar from Western feminism, as is the �p�logo. While the broader themes were appropriated fromabroad, local symbols were used to express internationalideas. Singing their modified Hakka songs, the womenwore traditional hats colloquially known as “Hakkahats”—an ironic choice of symbols given that Hakkasare a denigrated group in the New Territories. Even theslogans about feudalism were a way to put gender equal-ity in a regional historical context.

The overarching appropriation of Western feministconcepts and activist techniques is interesting becausemany of Hong Kong’s women’s groups were founded spe-cifically to indigenize Western feminism. AAF, for ex-ample, was founded “to bring together people who speakour language and share a similar background” and “workwithin our own culture” (AAF founder quoted in Choi1995:95).22 Still, even if ideas and tactics were borrowedfrom abroad, the women’s groups were indigenized inthe sense that the leaders were Hong Kong women anddiscussions were conducted primarily in Cantonese. Indiscussing the role of the Hong Kong Women ChristianCouncil, one of the founding members emphasized theimportance of local leadership: “[We are] a local Chris-tian women’s group, not the expatriates. If they join us,then they may play a supporter’s role . . . but we have alocal basis” (quoted in Choi 1995:97).

indigenous women

The indigenous women’s were the only lower-classvoices in the female inheritance movement. While 200indigenous women signed petitions supporting themovement, only 6 had high-profile roles (Chan 1995:17).Of these 5 were relatively poor, 4 had very limited ed-ucation, 3 were Hakka, and 1 spoke only Hakka (pp.

22. Fanny Cheung, the founder of the Hong Kong Federation ofWomen’s Centres, says that it takes a “community approach” thatdiffers from Western feminism; in addition to mobilizing com-munity resources, it seeks to avoid confrontation and militancy(Lee 2000:253).


42–46).23 One spoke fluent English and had been edu-cated at a local university, traveled widely, and workedas a reporter (pp. 46, 95); while the other women hopedto recover their parents’ property and assert their iden-tities as lineage members, this woman participated inthe movement to support gender equality and humanrights (pp. 40, 42, 46). Comparing these six women withthe Kuk elite, it is clear that there was a class-struggleaspect to the movement. One of the indigenous womenremarked, “Before, when all the villagers were poor, wehelped each other out. Now we are enemies” (pp. 30–32).However, the movement focused on gender, not class.One of the few references to class came from Ms. Cheng:“Before we had nothing while the male villagers hadeverything. There was a wide gap between rich and poor,and women were inferior at that time” (interview, AsiaTelevision News, February 27, 2001). In her mind, classand gender were intertwined. Women were inferior notjust because they were women but because they werepoor.

The indigenous women slowly shifted from seeingtheir stories as individual kinship violations to broaderexamples of discrimination. The theme of rights and gen-der equality was prominent in documents collectivelywritten by the Residents Committee. In an article pub-lished in the Hong Kong Federation of Women’s Centresannual report, the committee called the denial of femaleinheritance “a century-long discriminatory barrier to theindigenous women’s basic rights” (Hong Kong Federa-tion of Women’s Centres 1994:88). A submission to theLegislative Council talked about the “inherent right” tosuccession and mentioned “the protection to womenthat has been laid down in the United Nations UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights” (Anti-Discrimination Fe-male Indigenous Residents Committee 1994). Becausethe majority of the indigenous women were illiterate, itis probable that such articles and statements wereguided, if not written, by Linda Wong or the other out-siders on the Residents Committee.

On an individual level, Ms. Cheng was both the personmost comfortable talking about female inheritance interms of equality and rights and the person most com-fortable talking to the press. In one interview she said,“What I am fighting for is sexual equality” (Sunday Tel-egraph, October 24, 1993). At another point she said thatif the government refused to change the law it “wouldbe violating the Bill of Rights” (Hong Kong Standard,October 14, 1993). In contrast, another indigenouswoman’s critique of the New Territories Ordinance waslimited to the fact that “the legislation does not takecare of situations where families do not have any sons,which is my case” (South China Morning Post, February25, 1993). Because she spoke rights language, Ms. Chengcould bring the women’s concerns to a wider public.

23. According to interviews with Wong and Chan in 2003, of theseven indigenous women who formed the core of the ResidentsCommittee, four were illiterate. None were educated beyond sec-ondary school.

translators

There were relatively few points of contact between thefour layers. After their initial work framing the issue,the expatriates attended rallies but rarely went to coa-lition meetings. The fact that coalition meetings wereheld in Cantonese was an important barrier. Thewomen’s groups informed Christine Loh about upcom-ing demonstrations, but there was little dialogue withLoh or her office. And the indigenous women had littlecontact with any of the other layers except to attendformal Legislative Council hearings and rallies. Never-theless, these four layers formed a coalition that madethe female inheritance movement possible. Each layerwas aware that it had to work with the others for themovement to succeed. For example, when the head ofthe Kuk, Lau Wong-fat, claimed that respect for thetraditions of indigenous people helped promote harmonyin society, a supporter of the movement in the LegislativeCouncil retorted that they had received complaints fromfemale indigenous residents that they were “oppressedby the sexist traditions” (South China Morning Post, Oc-tober 14, 1993). The legislator was able to call on indig-enous women’s voices to refute the Kuk’s call for re-specting tradition.

A few translators connected the layers. Translators canmove between layers because they conceptualize the is-sue in more than one way and can translate one set ofprinciples and terms into another. They created a move-ment in which rights language and indigenous women’sstories could come together to create political change.Although the women did acquire some consciousness ofrights through participation in the Residents Commit-tee, rights language was mainly promoted by others.Through translators, the indigenous women joined theirstories to a larger movement concerned with humanrights and discrimination.

Our research uncovered at least three people who actedas translators: Lai-sheung Cheng, Linda Wong, and AnnaWu. Ms. Cheng, in essence, created the Residents Com-mittee by finding other women with similar stories whowere ready to step forward. Through her participation incoalition meetings and her contacts with the media, shebrought the women’s concerns to a wider audience. Shewas able to generalize individual kinship grievances andlobby for a change in the law. By having a voice in thecoalition’s strategy, she was also able to shape how thewomen’s stories were used in the movement.

Although she did not have a formal leadership title,Linda Wong was a critical link between the indigenouswomen and the broader world. The women were able totell their stories in the Legislative Council because LindaWong created the opportunity and showed them how todo it. With the help of other outsiders, she helped framethe women’s stories in terms of equality and rights sothat they were politically viable. In contrast to the in-digenous women, who rarely traveled outside of the NewTerritories, Wong had experience in activism and had agood idea what the media and the public would findappealing. The carefully orchestrated dramas and songs


had, in the words of one participant, a “symbolic meet-ing” that “became an icon for the whole movement”(Chan interview, 2003). Wong also literally translated theCantonese and Hakka used by the indigenous womeninto English. Using English ensured that the women’sstories reached a wider audience and were taken seri-ously by elites. In a sense, both Linda Wong and Lai-sheung Cheng translated “up”; they took stories an-chored in a local kinship idiom and talked about themin global rights language.

In the Legislative Council, Anna Wu was a translatorof quite a different kind. With help from other legislativecouncillors, Wu brought international law, a concernmainly expressed by the expatriate layer, into the Leg-islative Council debate. However, it is clear from herattempt to codify indigenous women’s customary rightsthat she also understood and appreciated the kinship sys-tem.24 By bringing the kinship system into a dialogueabout rights, she helped to localize the debate. This lo-calization could have gone farther if other legislativecouncillors had been sensitive to the kinship dimension.The issue died quietly because the discussion was dom-inated by the tradition-versus-rights debate.

local as a matter of degree?

Taking about the female inheritance movement in termsof layers is implicitly a discussion about what it meansto be local and global. As an international import, rightstalk is, by definition, global. More global layers tendedto see female inheritance as an international humanrights issue, more local layers as a kinship violation.However, the terms “global” and “local” are not partic-ularly useful. They are often a stand-in for social class.To say that the indigenous women are local while theexpatriates are global is to say that the expatriates areeducated, mobile, and rich while the indigenous womenare illiterate, fixed, and poor. In an international city likeHong Kong, it is not even clear that there is any “local.”Global influences are so pervasive that “local” is a mat-ter of degree.

“Local” is a particularly slippery word because no onein the female inheritance movement is a truly local ac-tor. The indigenous women seem local, for example, butone of the core members of the Residents Committeelived in Holland; she had found out about the inheritancedebate during a visit home (Wong and Chan interview,2003). The Heung Yee Kuk is actually a transnationalgroup because so many villagers have emigrated but re-tain their New Territories identity. They help pay forcelebrations, and many come back to reconnect withtheir villages during yearly rituals (Chan 2001:276). Theyfeel strongly about preserving the past, and, as a result,indigenous tradition is largely financed, protected, and

24. In an early meeting with the indigenous women, Wu suggestedthat the women might be able to sue male relatives for failing tolive up to their responsibilities. Compared with other legislativecouncillors, Wu left the indigenous women with a sense that herview of the issue was closest to theirs (Wong interview, 2003).

promulgated by people who no longer live in Hong Kong.Overseas villagers were encouraged to participate indemonstrations against the female inheritance move-ment, and the Headquarters for the Protection for theVillage and Defense of the Clan even established a U.K.branch (Tong 1999:58).

As a transnational actor, the Kuk was attuned to thepersuasiveness of human rights language. In the late1960s it had closely watched Britain’s behavior in Gi-braltar and learned that indigenous people were entitledto certain rights (Chan 1998:41). In a 1994 proclamation,the Kuk appealed to international norms to protect localtradition: “The indigenous inhabitants of any country inthe world all have their legitimate traditions and cus-toms well protected by law. . . . Therefore the existingprovisions in the legislation to safeguard the traditionalcustoms of New Territories indigenous inhabitants are. . . a primary obligation of the Hong Kong government”(quoted in Chan 1998:42). It was a stretch, but duringthe October 1993 motion debate one legislative coun-cillor argued that female inheritance would violate thehuman rights of ancestors. “There should not be a doublestandard in human rights,” he said. “As we have to re-spect the human rights of our contemporaries, we havealso to respect the human rights of our ancient ances-tors” (Hong Kong Hansard 1993:268).

“Global” and “local” become particularly meaninglessin the context of international politics. Against the back-drop of the 1997 handover and the larger question ofSino-British relations, every issue in Hong Kong had aglobal dimension. The Kuk lobbied hard for China’s sup-port as a way of putting pressure on individual legislatorsto vote down the land exemption ordinance.25 AlthoughChina’s top leaders did not comment on the inheritancequestion, China was initially supportive of the Kuk. Boththe Xinhua news agency, China’s de facto embassy inHong Kong, and the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs officereleased statements in March 1994 warning the HongKong government that the amended ordinance violatedthe Basic Law (Lui 1997:chap. 4, 13; Wong 2000:187).Following up on this, Kuk representatives met China’sambassador in England on April 5 (Tsang and Wan 1994:10) and found the ambassador supportive. China’s sup-port noticeably waned, however, as the vote on the or-dinance drew closer. The internal workings of theChinese Communist Party (CCP) are opaque, but it musthave decided that international bad press about lack ofsupport for gender equality was not worth the supportof the Kuk.26

25. The tactic of appealing to China continued even after the or-dinance was passed. In 1997, the Kuk lobbied the Preparatory Com-mittee, the body reviewing Hong Kong’s laws in preparation for thehandover, to repeal female inheritance in the rural New Territories.When the Preparatory Committee let the land exemption ordinancestand, the Kuk appealed to the National People’s Congress. Ulti-mately, this tactic also failed.26. At the time, China was under substantial international pressurebecause of its human rights record. In contrast, China had a rela-tively good record on gender equality, and this must have beensomething that the CCP wanted to preserve (Petersen interview,2003).


Moreover, the “local” problem of female inheritancewas created by the world’s ultimate global system—co-lonialism. The root of the problem was, of course, thepreservation of Chinese customary land law under theBritish, but this was not the root cause of the Kuk’sopposition to the land exemption ordinance. Customswere slowly changing in the New Territories, and it wasbecoming more and more common for women to inheritmoney, if not land (Chan 1997:169). The Kuk was nothorrified by the idea of female inheritance per se; itwanted to protect the profits guaranteed under anothercolonial policy, the 1972 small-house policy. The small-house policy allowed any male villager who could tracehis lineage back to 1898 to obtain a 700-square-foot pieceof land, free of land premium, to build a house for himselfwithin the borders of the village (Chan 2003:72).27 AllNew Territories men, even those overseas, are eligiblefor this once-in-lifetime land grant. The original aim ofthe policy was to replace temporary housing and allowfor natural growth in the New Territories, but a glut ofsmall houses has led to rapid development (Hopkinsonand Lei 2003:2). Although the small-house policy wasoriginally considered a privilege that would be abolishedif abused, it has come to be seen as a right (Hopkinsonand Lei 2003:4, 31), and because of rising land values itis a very valuable one. Although the Kuk cites clan con-tinuity as the primary justification for the policy, housesare often sold or rented to outsiders for a profit (Chan1999:238–40). During the female inheritance movementit was an open secret that the Kuk was concerned thatfemale inheritance would lead to the repeal of other in-digenous rights, particularly the small-house policy (seeChan 2003). The village elder Bruce Kan even said pub-licly, “The next thing the government would do is cancelour rights on applying for land” (South China MorningPost, March 27, 1993).

But the zeitgeist was simply against the Kuk. The years1989–97 were the high tide of human rights conscious-ness in Hong Kong (Petersen interview, 2003). The 1991passage of the Bill of Rights, based on the ICCPR, en-couraged everyone, including women, to think in termsof human rights (Petersen and Samuels 2002:24). Greaterawareness of human rights coincided with Patten’s dem-ocratic reforms, particularly the 1992 reform packageand the 1991 introduction of direct elections to the Leg-islative Council. Democratization led to increased at-tention to local problems.28 As Christine Loh said, “Itwas the golden age of democracy in Hong Kong, and Iwas honored to be the salad tosser” (Loh interview, 2003).

27. In 1995 the UN Committee on Economic and Social Rightscomplained that the small-house policy discriminated againstwomen (Hopkinson and Lei 2003:23). Although the policy has beenunder review since 1996, extending it to include women is not seenas an option because there is simply not enough land.28. A great deal of attention has been given to the connection be-tween democratization and increased support for women’s rights(see Fischler 2000; Lui 1997; Tong 1999, n.d.).

Conclusion

The female inheritance movement illustrates the local-ization of global ideas. Gender equality, feminism, andhuman rights are ideas borrowed from another culturalcontext, spread through the UN system of treaties andmajor world conferences which draw government andnongovernmental activists together from all parts of theglobe. This language was clearly critical to this move-ment at all levels, although to varying degrees. Much hasbeen written about the importance of technology, par-ticularly the Internet, as a force behind the globalizationof ideas, but the female inheritance movement under-scores the importance of people. Much of the rights dis-course was introduced by expatriates. It was subse-quently picked up by Hong Kong residents who hadeither spent time abroad, like Christine Loh and AnnaWu, or been exposed to this kind of language by others.As people flow across borders in search of jobs or edu-cation, they carry ideas with them. Cultural translatorsreinterpret these ideas in ways that make sense in moreparticular and local terms.

Success is important to the spread of traveling theoriessuch as that of human rights. During the campaign, theindigenous women expected that the new law would al-low them to inherit their fathers’ property, althoughsome also filed lawsuits (Chan 1995:48). However, theland exemption ordinance was not retroactive, so theoriginal claimants whose fathers had already died did notbenefit. They had to file lawsuits under Chinese custom-ary law and could only sue for compensation for malerelatives’ failure to fulfill their kinship obligations (pp.18, 50, 134). Lack of success probably contributed tothese women’s disappearance from rights-based move-ments. Yet some of the indigenous women in the move-ment continued to talk about their misfortunes in termsof gender discrimination, injustice, and the land exemp-tion ordinance. They still articulated their grievances inrights terms, even if they did not regain their propertyor become recognized as daughters in the lineage system(p. 146). In contrast, the passage of the law gave thewomen’s groups, some legislators, and the expatriates adramatic victory. And it is these groups rather than theindigenous women who sustained a long-term commit-ment to a rights framework.

The female inheritance movement shows that thepower of rights discourse lies in its flexibility and con-tingency. As the recent literature on rights suggests, thebroad umbrella of rights language can allow people withvery different conceptions of the issue to work together(see Milner 1986, McCann 1994, Gilliom 2001, Gold-berg-Hiller 2002, Goldberg-Hiller and Milner 2003).Through a system of layers and translators, women atthe grass roots used rights language in a far more con-tingent and limited way than elites. Moreover, the rightsframe was layered over the kinship frame, producing akind of double consciousness. The female inheritancemovement shows that rights mobilization does not re-quire a deep and abiding commitment. Rather, it can be


adopted in a more transitory and tentative way contin-gent on success. Although framing rights in local termsmay increase their legitimacy and effectiveness, thisanalysis shows that not all participants in a movementneed to be deeply committed to this framework.

The female inheritance movement also shows thatrights language is appropriated because it is politicallyuseful, not because it is imposed. In 1994 Hong Kong,rights had political currency precisely because they wereassociated with the international world and modernity.Both citizens and the government were concerned aboutlosing Hong Kong’s liberal traditions after the 1997 han-dover. Allegiance to gender equality and human rightswas a sign, both to the people in Hong Kong and to theoutside world, that things in Hong Kong were not goingto change—that Hong Kong deserved a place in the “civ-ilized” community of nations.

Comments

monique deveauxDepartment of Political Science, Williams College,Williamstown, MA 01267, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 19 x 4

Merry and Stern are right to reject as oversimple theassumption that rights discourse is culturally exogenousto indigenous societies and the dichotomies that sustainit: tradition versus modernity, local versus global, rela-tivism versus universalism. Their exploration of howrights talk was “indigenized,” translated, and appropri-ated by the female inheritance movement in HongKong’s New Territories in the early 1990s is an excellentillustration of the fungible, flexible character of rights.As such, it helps to debunk dogmatic and surely falseclaims to the effect that where rights are invoked by, say,indigenous peoples, it is only because this normativeframework has been imposed.

Having said that, it is remarkable how much of theevidence Merry and Stern assemble to show how indig-enous women came to use human rights language toarticulate and defend their demands actually reinforcesthis view of rights as external artifice. The strategic andultimately temporary character of their appropriation ofrights is readily acknowledged. Coached by urban gen-der-equality activists, those active in the women’s in-heritance movement learned to protest unjust customarylaws in the language of rights and equality; those whodid not, we learn, were silenced or ignored. While thisattests to the political purchase of rights—the unfair in-heritance rules were, after all, overturned—it also revealsthe unsurprising conclusion that rights remained exter-nal to the self-understandings of many people, includingrural, indigenous women in the New Territories. Thatthey needed to learn to translate their demands is a func-tion of the national and transnational political institu-tions and frameworks that bear directly on the legal

status of discriminatory inheritance laws and does notnecessarily attest to the inherent appropriateness ofrights discourse to their particular struggle.

Clearly it is not Merry and Stern’s aim to evaluate theuse of rights in this case in normative terms; their in-terest is to investigate in practical and analytical termsthe “local appropriation of global cultural products,”namely, human rights. But surely it is worth askingabout the fit of rights language and about the power re-lations—both local and global—that made the adoptionof rights language the only viable political option. Merryand Stern note that “there is little evidence that theindigenous women developed a sustained critique oftheir problems based on human rights”; one cannot helpbut wonder whether this language was not, despite theirconclusion to the contrary, an imposition on the wayrural women think about their lives and entitlements.The requirement that they frame their concerns in thelanguage of rights is perfectly understandable from thestandpoint of political strategy, but this does not meanthat we should not ask hard questions about the trou-bling power relationships (e.g., between urban politicalelites and rural indigenous women, between indigenousjustice narratives and transnational political frame-works) that make it necessary.

Why ask these questions at all? Rights discourse is thepreeminent language for demanding justice in our time,but rights have occupied a fraught place in struggles byindigenous peoples, including indigenous women’squests for sexual justice. As Merry and Stern argue, how-ever, rights discourse can be taken up even by those whoare ambivalent about their content; “rights mobilizationdoes not require a deep and abiding commitment.” Cer-tainly aboriginal peoples, including women, have ap-pealed widely to rights in the context of national social,legal, and political frameworks, as well as to humanrights, in asserting collective aboriginal entitlements anddemanding recognition and protections from states(Barsh 1995, Bell 1992). From land claims to indigenousgroup rights, both the jargon and the legal reality of rightsare difficult to avoid.

At the same time, however, rights discourse has beendenounced by some indigenous scholars and activistsalike as reflecting colonial, European conceptions of theindividual and of individuals’ relation to the broadercommunity (Alfred 1999, Turpel and Monture 1990,Tully 2000). Indeed, in the case of indigenous women’smovements, the ideal of gender equality has been criti-cized as “inappropriate conceptually and culturally” andas “not an important political or social concept” for ab-original communities, in the words of one First Nationswoman scholar (Turpel 1993:179). Aboriginal ideals ofcommunity harmony, healing, and gender complemen-tarity are frequently cited as alternatives to Europeanconcepts of justice and equality, while oral history, sto-rytelling, and life narratives are readily defended by in-digenous peoples as legitimate discursive strategies inpolitical life (Lake 2003), ones that can even supplantlegal rights talk. While Merry and Stern—no doubtwisely—do not seek to enter the fray of this particular


debate, it is nevertheless the missing normative contextof their argument. Indigenous women, as the female in-heritance movement example shows, can readily couchtheir justice struggles in the framework of rights, andtheir political success may depend upon it; but do theywant to, and should they have to?

masamichi s . inoueJapan Studies Program/Department of Modern andClassical Languages, Literatures and Cultures,University of Kentucky, 1055 Patterson Office Tower,Lexington, KY 40506-0027, U.S.A. ([email protected]).31 x 04

Merry and Stern’s engaged and nuanced analysis of thefemale inheritance movement in Hong Kong helps uspose critical questions concerning contemporary socialmovements, local identity, and globalization in a newtheoretical perspective. As an anthropologist working ona similar set of questions in Okinawa (e.g., Inoue 2004),I find their concepts of “layers” and “translators” par-ticularly interesting, informative, and thought-provok-ing. By placing these ideas in critical conversation withTalal Asad’s notion of the concept of cultural translation,the significance—in spite of certain problems—of theirarticle will come into even sharper focus.

Asad (1986) explored anthropological (i.e., cultural)translation as “a process of power” (p. 148) and notedthat “because the languages of Third World societies—including, of course, the societies that social anthropol-ogists have traditionally studied—are ‘weaker’ in rela-tion to Western languages (and today, especially toEnglish), they are more likely to submit to forcible trans-formation in the translation process than the other wayaround” (pp. 157–58). Merry and Stern’s article both re-futes and reinforces Asad’s observation.

It refutes or at least complicates the notion that thelanguages of Third World societies are being subjectedto “forcible transformation in the translation process”in three interrelated ways. First, Merry and Stern dem-onstrate that the female inheritance movement activelymodified, redefined, and appropriated internationalrights language instead of being simply translated by thatlanguage. Second, they show that the language mobilizedby this movement was not monolithic but differenti-ated—sometimes fragmented—into multiple layerswhose potencies were not equal. In other words, layerssignificantly differing from each other in social class,ideological orientation, education, and so forth, were notall “weak” in relation to Western languages/English inthe same way. Third, Merry and Stern themselves func-tion as excellent “translators.” They move across differ-ent layers of the women’s struggle and different mo-ments of Hong Kong history to present a comprehensiveand complex picture of the female inheritance move-ment to the international audience of current anthro-pology and, in so doing, contribute to empowering aspecific Third World language.

Yet Merry and Stern inadvertently reinforce what Asad

calls “the inequality of languages” (1986:156) in the veryact of complicating it, because the direction of theirtranslation seems to be primarily from the lower layers(the indigenous women) to the upper ones (supranationalexpatriates, elite national legislators, and local middle-class activists, students, and social workers) and not theother way around. Put differently, in the midst of ex-ploring the female inheritance movement in terms ofglobal metropolitan rights language, there is a generalinattention to the particular forms that cultural mean-ings and social identities of these indigenous womentook in the process and aftermath of the movement. Forexample, why did indigenous women drop out of themovement after the land exemption ordinance waspassed? What did the indigenous women feel and thinkwhen the elite women disciplined them to take the localout of their stories? What did the oldest participant (anindigenous woman) in the movement experience, in herown words, when she was suddenly interrupted by thechairperson of a Legislative Council session? The indig-enous women’s frustration with the rights language isbriefly mentioned and surmised, but the nature, thrust,and intensity of this “frustration” is not fully exploredin spite of the indigenous women’s status as the protag-onists of this social drama. In sum, while we see clearlythe ways in which stories grounded in a local kinshipidiom came to be framed “up” within internationalrights language through the efforts of various partici-pants in the movement, we are not entirely clear aboutthe ways in which rights language was anchored, inter-preted, and framed “down” in kinship and other specificlocal idioms by the lower layer of the movement.

Merry and Stern’s work implies that anthropologistsare an integral part of “layers” of various political andsocial struggles in the world. It also reinforces Asad’sidea that anthropologists can potentially function as cul-tural “translators” who make a difference by fully ex-ploring the experiences of local subjects and, perhaps,also by writing and speaking in Third World languagesas well as in English. It has not yet fully delivered whatit has promised. I wonder what Merry and Stern thinkabout such potentialities and about the responsibilitiesof anthropologists in this age of globalization.

s iumi maria tamDepartment of Anthropology, Chinese University ofHong Kong, Hong Kong ([email protected]). 31 x 04

The way in which localization and globalization interacthas been an important issue for anthropologists, andMerry and Stern’s analysis of the female inheritance rightsmovement in Hong Kong offers a very good case study.Proposing a framework of “layers” and “translators” forunderstanding the players and action that constituted themovement, they have demonstrated effectively how theindigenous women gradually adopted the internationallanguage of rights because it was found to be more effi-cacious than the language of mistreatment by male kin.


They have also illustrated how changes in the social en-vironment in Hong Kong—the increase in urbanites livingin the New Territories (making inheritance an issue thatwent beyond the indigenous population), the Hong Konggovernment’s eagerness to uphold the image of a West-ernized metropolis, and a post-1989 Beijing taking care toavoid accusations of gender discrimination, of being “un-civilized” and “feudal”—contributed to a political ecologythat favored the passage of the ordinance amendment.This timeliness of the movement—with memories of the1989 Tiananmen incident fresh and the 1997 handoverimpending—made human rights language a most appro-priate strategy for participants.

While I appreciate the delineation of the four “layers”of the movement, namely, the expatriates, the Legisla-tive Council, the women’s groups, and the indigenouswomen themselves, I find it difficult to agree that thesewere hierarchically related in terms of their closeness torights language as a resource. In addition, while the fourwere no doubt major players in the movement, Merryand Stern might also have noted the roles of other im-portant players without which the rights language couldnot have been utilized so effectively. The media, men,and the Heung Yee Kuk itself were in a very real senseas much the bridge between the local and the global asthe four groups discussed. This points to the need forfurther contextualization of the movement to appreciatethe complexity of the process. In this connection, myquestions are as follows:

1. What was the role of men, particularly the profem-inists, the kinsmen of the protagonists, and the new res-idents of the New Territories whose daughters’ inheri-tance rights were affected—complicated by their degreesof affinity with a “global” idea of gender equality and a“Chinese” concept of male superiority?

2. How did the local media contribute to the move-ment at different stages? The local Chinese press wasthe first to publicize the issue, and as the movementwent on it became quite clear that the media were onthe side of “progress” and “rights” as universal valuesand generally portrayed village men in a negative light.

3. Why is the Heung Yee Kuk, itself a transnationalorganization, as Merry and Stern argue, and employingrights language (such as ancestors’, family, and kinshiprights) and at one point portraying itself as a victim, notone of the “layers” and “translators” (albeit on the otherside of the interests being fought over)?

4. In some important ways the researchers depart fromlocal understandings of the role of certain key “trans-lators” such as Christine Loh, who was almost the per-sonal face of the Legislative Council’s sympathy to themovement. The AAF (and very often the legislators aswell) respected village traditions (however defined) andput the blame on (male) village heads for either not clar-ifying the nature of the amendment to villagers or mis-leading them. Thus, like Anna Wu, these other playersunderstood the potential advantage of a male-centeredkinship system for the welfare of the women, as well asthe strategic importance of not demonizing all men andthe patriarchal village structure. The role of “traditional”

Chinese culture and the way in which individuals wereseen to be related to it deserve more in-depth discussion.

These questions might have been more readily an-swered if the researchers had had the benefit of partici-pant observation at the time of the movement. The seriesof happenings in 1993–94 could have been interpreted asa triumph of women’s rights, but this has not generalizedinto gender equality. As a number of feminists in HongKong have argued, this is because in most of the local“women’s rights” movements women’s rights have beeninterpreted as women’s welfare, leaving the patriarchalsystem unchallenged.

kwong-leung tangDepartment of Social Work, Chinese University ofHong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong ([email protected]). 1 xi 04

Much has been written about the development of thehuman rights canon through the United Nations. Yet,human rights treaties adopted in an international forumface obstacles to their implementation in local contexts.The promotion of women’s human rights is a case inpoint. While advocates believe that women’s oppressionand discrimination can be overcome by internationallaw, it remains doubtful whether the overarching humanrights framework can be effectively used to championthe cause of disadvantaged women in national/local con-texts. Many analysts continue to question whether in-ternational formulations of rights are useful for women.Acknowledging that transnational rights ideas cannot bescrutinized apart from the local movements, current re-search has shifted towards studying the intersection be-tween local movements and global processes. Theorizingof such an interface is critically important and ought tobe empirically grounded.

In light of these considerations, Merry and Stern offeran eloquent and perceptive theorizing of local translationof global rights. Essentially, they examine how genderequality and human rights could be used to deal withdiscrimination against women by traditional cultures. Us-ing the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong as acase study, they suggest that the localization of women’shuman rights hinges on activist groups (“layers”) and“translators” who bring about collaboration between lay-ers. Among the numerous obstacles encountered, the im-portant gap between women’s experiences and the inde-terminacy of statements of human rights (Cook 1994)remains to be bridged. The translators play a pivotal rolehere. “Cultural translators” interpret global ideas in theform that is intelligible to local people. They help indig-enous women to reframe their stories as violations of aright to protection from gender discrimination.

Overall, the characterization of the layers is apt, butone particular layer may be undergoing transformationover time. Four layers, distinguished by “their relation-ships to rights language and their relative distance fromtransnational ideas,” are identified: expatriates, legisla-tive councillors, women’s groups, and indigenous


women. Yet, the layer of legislative councillors is not ahomogeneous entity. In fact, the Legislative Council hasbeen noted for constant tugs-of-war among members,particularly between those who hold ultra-conservativeideas and those who embrace global rights ideas.

The researchers allude to the importance of timing. Itis true that it worked in favor of the women’s groups,since the female inheritance movement took place inthe “age of democracy” right after the Tiananmen Squarecrackdown of 1989. However, the role of the state andits relationships with key actors merit closer scrutiny.The colonial state, ready to give up its control in 1997,was still in a powerful position to determine the out-come of the movement. The arrival in 1992 of ChrisPatten, the last governor and an astute professional pol-itician championing democratic rights for the people,made a real difference.

Another direction involves the study of inhibiting fac-tors in the politics of protest: actors that resist globalideas and limit human rights discourses to protect theirinterests. As the researchers contend, the weakening ofthe previously strong alliance between the Heung YeeKuk (ultimately outmaneuvered by the women’s move-ment) and the colonial elites mattered. But the paperoffers only a glimpse of the Kuk’s ideologies, interests,and strategies and misses the subtle changes in its re-lationship with the state as it became more and morepro-Beijing in outlook. Unsurprisingly, the Kuk is nowviewed by many as a strong voice opposing internationallaw and local policy on women’s rights should these un-dermine its economic interests. It is a much more pow-erful group, as the post-colonial state has been its strongally since the transition. One wonders whether the suc-cess of the female inheritance movement could be “rep-licated” under these changed conditions.

While Merry and Stern see human rights as a resourcefor local movements, there are complex dimensions tothe interface between global ideas and local processes.In particular, their analysis of the local/global interfacewould have been more illuminating had the impacts oflocal processes on global rights discourse been analyzed.Nevertheless, they rightly observe that the potency ofrights discourses is contingent and flexible. Paradoxi-cally, its very strength is its weakness. Strategically,while global human rights discourse offers a focus forwomen’s groups, local movements have not been en-during. A deep and sustainable commitment to women’shuman rights may be lacking among the activists andindigenous women. Despite the success of the femaleinheritance movement, similar actions to promotewomen’s human rights remain few and far between. Infact, key developments in women’s human rights go un-heeded. Concerns regarding continued discriminationagainst women have recently resulted in the UN’s adop-tion (in 1999) of the Optional Protocol, giving womenthe right to complain to the UN about violations of theConvention and providing for a remedy for victims (Tang2004). While women’s groups in other countries haveactively pursued its ratification, the Optional Protocolis glossed over by the post-colonial state, the newly es-

tablished Women’s Commission, and, to the surprise ofmany, some of the women’s groups that were involvedin the female inheritance movement.

keebet von benda-beckmannMax-Planck-Institut fur Ethnologische Forschung,Projektgruppe Rechtspluralismus, Advokatenweg 36,06114 Halle/S., Germany ([email protected]).18 x 04

Merry and Stern’s study of the female inheritance move-ment in Hong Kong is an important empiricallygrounded contribution to the debate on globalization andhuman rights. Rather than looking at local interpreta-tions of human rights themselves, often labeled verna-cularized or hybrid, the authors look into the processesthrough which this “local appropriation” takes place. Itinvolves chains of groups of actors operating at differentlevels and with distinct ideological orientations throughwhich the human rights ideas are communicated. Themain theoretical problem they address is how it is pos-sible for these groups, with their distinct ideological ori-entations, to cooperate and to gain political influence.They show that it requires “translators,” people who areable to translate a problem from one vernacular to an-other. This mechanism of translation between “layers”is crucial to the success of the movement. They argueconvincingly that it is not necessary that human rightslanguage be regarded as legitimate by all members of asociety or even adopted by all the layers of the movementto be effective. They explain how the debate about fe-male inheritance is caught up in a wider range of politicalissues, among them the privileges in housing policies ofthe indigenous population of the New Territories.

The paper discusses two fundamental problems entailedin the translating process: the problem of alienation andthe tension between individual and structural approaches.Some of the participants in the lowest layer of the move-ment see their stories and worries disappear in the trans-lation process, to be replaced by formulations to whichthey cannot relate. There is a class issue here, as the layersare hierarchically ordered and those in the top layer setthe agenda and determine the idiom in which stories areto be told. Similar processes of alienation and disposses-sion have been known since the 1970s from research inthe sociology and anthropology of law in Europe and theU.S.A.: the disputing parties often no longer recognizetheir dispute once it has been reformulated by lawyers tomake it acceptable to the courts.

Secondly, research in the 1970s on legal clinics andsocial advocates’ practices in a country like the Neth-erlands showed the deep contradictions between protag-onists of structural change and clients wanting to resolveindividual problems. The female inheritance movementin Hong Kong shows similar internal contradictionsamong the layers within the movement. Here, too, par-ticipants in the lowest layer, seeking redress for theirindividual grievances without challenging the inheri-tance rules as such, withdraw from a movement that has


no interest in individual problems but aims at structuralchange, the main interest of the upper layers.

The lowest layer of the movement has some intriguingcharacteristics. Most participants are not purely localactors. Merry and Stern attribute this to the fact thatHong Kong is an international city whose citizens gen-erally have connections beyond its borders, though theextent of globalized connections differs. This may be thecase, but one wonders whether involvement in themovement might be skewed towards women with suchconnections. This is all the more likely if one considersanother feature that Merry and Stern mention but do notdiscuss in great detail. Almost all members of the lowestlayer of the movement are women without male siblings.In fact, several mentioned that they would have no ob-jection to their brothers’ inheriting everything; they justthink that in the absence of brothers women should beallowed to inherit and should not be made dependent onthe whims of cousins or uncles. Women suffering underpatriarchal brothers apparently do not dare to speak upin public. The participants in the movement, then, areatypical. Interestingly, they are atypical for Hong Kongbut not for China, where the one-child policy must haveleft many women without brothers. But then, China haslong made female inheritance the legal norm, though itis not clear to what extent this has replaced customarylaw in practice. Paradoxically, Hong Kong remains in thisrespect in isolation, despite its many connections withthe outside world.

The paper does not allow us to judge whether the par-ticipants involved in the movement are indeed atypical.If they are, the question is how the results of the move-ment relate to women who do have brothers and whohave few contacts beyond the borders of Hong Kong. Dothe creative translation techniques of songs and playsreach these women, and how do they respond? While thepaper discusses the conditions for political success at thetop, it is less specific about the bottom. This calls forfurther research.

Reply

sally engle merry and rachel sternWellesley, Mass., U.S.A. 10 xii 04

It is a pleasure to hear readers’ thoughts and to begin adialogue about both the details of the female inheritancemovement and its wider meaning. As many of the read-ers point out, there are limitations on research conductedten years after an event took place. They express a desirefor more information about how the indigenous womenthemselves saw the use of rights language. Did they feelthat rights language was imposed from above? How, ifat all, was rights language “framed down,” or anchoredin claims about kinship? And how did indigenouswomen outside the movement respond to rights lan-guage? Was rights language a temporary strategic choice,

or did it change the way participants—or the wider HongKong public—thought about gender? These are interest-ing and important questions that are difficult to answerwithout the benefit of watching the events of 1993–94unfold firsthand. Although we interviewed many of thekey participants later, we would love to have observedthe nuances of indigenous women’s balancing of two setsof justice ideologies, one based on rights and one basedon kinship obligations.

But it is also the case that we were particularly inter-ested in the use of the idea of rights as a political strategyand in how rights language is introduced and interactswith alternative understandings of a problem. While wespeculate on the effect of rights language on conscious-ness, it is a separate project to consider how rights areunderstood locally and how that understanding changesthrough activism. As in McCann’s research on the payequity movement (1994), Gilliom’s study of welfare re-cipients (2001), and McAdam’s treatment of the civilrights movement (1989), answers to these questions re-quire sustained contact with movement participants todocument how activism transforms understandings. Weare now both exploring rights consciousness in othercontexts, as are other researchers.

Deveaux begins with the issue that animated this pro-ject in the first place: is using a human-rights frame forthe political struggle of indigenous women a “goodthing”? The question has several dimensions. Does thisindividualistic way of framing a grievance do violenceto the women’s own understanding of their situation? Itis imposed or voluntarily adopted? Is it politically effec-tive? Deveaux is right to pose these questions, and weare aware that our article answers only some of them.This is largely because we recognize that answers dependheavily on what standards one adopts for a “good thing.”Instead, we focused on the complicated linkages betweenindigenous women and a global human-rights discourse.We wanted to unpack the idea of imposition in order tosee the indigenous women themselves as strategic ac-tors, regardless of whether they maintained a long-termnormative commitment to a rights framework.

Inoue calls translation a “process of power” and sug-gests that our analysis reinforces the “inequality of lan-guages” by focusing on translation in only one direction.Instead, she asks for more attention to the consciousnessof the indigenous women and the way in which theirperspectives were incorporated into rights language. Thisis a valuable point and one that warrants further re-search. Piecing together the information we did gather,it appears that the inequality in translation, while sig-nificant, was not absolute and that the indigenouswomen, to various degrees, were engaged in reinterpre-tation and translation. Yet even as we look at multipleprocesses of translation, it is important to recognize thattranslators differ in terms of power and capacity to trans-late. And when power comes into play, languages are notnecessarily treated equally.

Von Benda-Beckmann also points to the power dynam-ics of translation when she observes that the indigenouswomen, at the bottom of the class hierarchy, watched


their stories disappear in the translation process. Sheshows important parallels with the legal process, inwhich conflicts are transformed by lawyers and courts.Her further point about the tension between helping in-dividuals and promoting structural change—present inboth the female inheritance movement and activist legalclinics in the Netherlands—is well taken.

Thus, Deveaux, Inoue, and Von Benda-Beckmann areall concerned with translation as a form of power. Inouesees the female inheritance case study, at least as wehave written it, as reinforcing a zero-sum view of powerwhich pits indigenous understandings against rights lan-guage with the idea that some discourses are more validand powerful than others. In a similar vein, Deveaux andVon Benda-Beckmann push us to ask hard questionsabout how indigenous women’s voices may have beensteamrollered. These commentators point out that lan-guage can be exclusive and discourse hegemonic. It isproblematic that rights language was the only legitimateway to talk about inheritance in the public sphere andthat the indigenous women’s complementary under-standings of their grievances were, of necessity, private.As Deveaux points out, questions about the inadequacyof rights language and frustration over its limitationshave already emerged in the area of indigenous rights,as they have in the sphere of women’s rights. Furtherresearch on the translation process could explore whatis lost when this kind of language is used.

Yet this is not a simple story of coercion in whichrights language is imposed from above. The indigenouswomen had choice and agency. There was a lot of pres-sure from neighbors and friends for them to drop theirclaims, and they could easily have dropped out of themovement. The fact that they did not indicates that, ata minimum, they understood the efficacy of rights lan-guage. For the indigenous women and, in fact, for thebroader inheritance movement, the idea of rights was atool for overturning a deeply entrenched status quo. AsMartha Minow puts it, rights are the “possessions of thedispossessed,” the refuge of the powerless (quoted inMcCann 1993:773).

We think that the female inheritance case study movesus toward a more additive view of power in which rightslanguage and indigenous understandings coexist and, bycoexisting, become more than the sum of their parts. Inthe female inheritance movement, rights language wassignificantly strengthened by the addition of the indig-enous women’s individual stories. While the indigenouswomen would not have won the right to inheritancewithout framing their claims in terms of rights, the widerwomen’s movement would not have been able to amendthe New Territories Ordinance without recourse to thewomen’s individual stories. Power moves in both direc-tions here. Rights language craves specificity just as spe-cific stories benefit from a wider frame.

Another strand of commentary either requests moredetail about other players in the movement or suggestsslightly different ways of aligning them. Tam, Tang, andVon Benda-Beckmann would like to know more aboutmen, the media, other indigenous women in the New

Territories, and the Heung Yee Kuk. They are particu-larly interested in how these other actors either usedrights language or responded to it.

While we are also quite interested in other actors, ourfour layers are a deconstruction of the female inheritancemovement, not an exhaustive list of everyone involvedin the debate. We inevitably simplified in order to de-velop a schematic description and analyze the transla-tion processes. In addition, we were specifically inter-ested in the coalition of people who came together topursue female inheritance and the different ways inwhich international rights language was used within thiscoalition to advocate change. Our hope is that scholarswill fill in gaps and add nuance, as Tang and Tam do intheir comments. Tang offers a particularly interestingpostscript, noting that even the women’s groups havenot sustained their focus on women’s human rights.

Inoue calls on us to speculate about the “responsibil-ities of anthropologists in this age of globalization.” Incontrast to the image of isolated academics holed up inan ivory tower, our research shows that academics canhave great influence. Expatriate academics in Hong Kongplayed a major role in introducing rights language to thediscussion over female inheritance, especially rights lan-guage anchored in international law. And, as Inouepoints out, we also played a role as translators by bringingthese different frames to an international audience. Weraised the profile of rights language by simply showingup and asking questions about it.

With influence comes responsibility. Anthropologistshave engaged in considerable debates over the power ofthe author to shape stories and represent other people’slives. We agree that academics need to be self-reflectiveand aware of the impact of their research. We, of course,brought the female inheritance movement a wider aca-demic audience and put our own spin on it. Because ourwork implicitly addresses the normative question thatDeveaux poses—is this a “good thing”?—it may be duck-ing responsibility not to have addressed that questiondirectly. We preferred, however, to offer our translationand allow readers to draw their own conclusions ac-cording to their own values.

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