Hong Kong opens up forbidden area with legacy of Xi’s father

HONG KONG — Hong Kong has partially opened up one of the last remaining forbidden areas in the territory, Sha Tau Kok, a village that was made off-limits 71 years ago to prevent the influx of illegal immigrants from mainland China.

The village in the northeastern corner of Hong Kong is part of an ambitious development plan to create a new metropolis along the border with Shenzhen, aimed at stimulating the local economy and enhance interactions with the mainland.

The opening up of Sha Tau Kok comes 44 years after Xi Zhongxun, the late father of President Xi Jinping, played a leading role in unlocking economic opportunities in Shatoujiao, the Mandarin name of the mainland side of the village. The senior Xi saw desperate economic disparities with Hong Kong at a time when China was crawling out of the shadows of the Cultural Revolution.

“Today is a big day for Sha Tau Kok to officially open up the pier to group tourists,” Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said at the opening ceremony on June 3. For the next six months, preregistered Hong Kong tour groups are permitted to visit certain parts of the village and ride a boat to neighboring islets through the restricted waters of Starling Inlet.

As Lam stressed in her short speech, the limited opening is an integral part of her pet Northern Metropolis Development Strategy, which was revealed last November. The new metropolis would cover nearly 300 sq. km along the city’s border with Shenzhen, where close to a million apartment units are to be built, housing up to 2.5 million people.

Part of the planned metropolis overlaps with the Frontier Closed Area, a buffer zone on the border that includes Sha Tau Kok, controlled by the police that was established in 1951 to combat illegal immigration, smuggling and other cross-boundary criminal activities. While the total area was cut down by 2016 to less than 4 sq. km from 28 sq. km, the framework remained after the 1997 handover of sovereignty from the U.K. Unauthorized entry by nonlocal residents can bring a fine of 5,000 Hong Kong dollars ($637) and imprisonment for two years.

The border area, as viewed from the mainland, was a clear recognition of the mainland’s backwardness for Xi Zhongxun, who had just been rehabilitated after 16 years of political persecution to assume a leadership role in Guangdong Province in April 1978.

“It has been a long time since the liberation, almost 30 years,” the senior Xi told local cadres during his visit to Shatoujiao in July 1978, observing the glittering scene on the Hong Kong side. He was viewing Zhongying Street, a 250-meter-long road splitting the village between Hong Kong and the mainland. “That side is very booming, but our side is tattered and worn out,” Xi said, according to official Chinese publications.

The road is called Chung Ying Street on the Hong Kong side, but both names have the same Chinese characters meaning Sino-British Street. It traces its history back to 1898, when an arbitrary line was drawn through the village as the U.K. forcibly expanded Hong Kong’s domain more than sevenfold through a 99-year lease on the New Territories.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping assists his father, Xi Zhongxun.

  © Xinhua/Kyodo

The elder Xi took office in Guangdong during a historic peak of mainland residents illegally crossing over to Hong Kong. The economic disparity had severely widened as China suffered through a series of political struggles after the communists clinched power in 1949. By 1978, the gross domestic product of all of Guangdong was just over half that of Hong Kong.

According to Fang Bao, then the Communist Party chief of Bao’an — today’s Shenzhen — the senior Xi allowed small-scale border trading to resume after it had been forbidden for being too “capitalistic” during the Cultural Revolution.

In the 2014 interview with state-backed media, Fang said the elder Xi also permitted various other business activities with Hong Kong, such as importing secondhand products, exporting sand and gravel and opening small businesses with Hong Kong investors. Local residents had been craving this but were stalled by central government licensing authorities who did not understand the reality and the desperate need on the ground.

“In order to invigorate the economy, the power of [business] approval should be delegated to the county level,” Xi Zhongxun told local cadres. Fang recalled that Xi authorized various kinds of deregulation to stimulate cross-border business activities, and Guangdong authorities invited Hong Kong businesses to set up joint ventures in manufacturing and agriculture in the province.

Residents on Shenzhen side of Shatoujiao, the Mandarin pronunciation of Sha Tau Kok, waving to the Hong Kong side of the same village but separated by the sea and barbed wires. (Photo by Kenji Kawase)

Zhang Zhigong — a longtime secretary to the elder Xi, serving before his political downfall and after his revival — remembers his boss emphasizing that the root cause of the severe exodus to Hong Kong was poverty caused by misguided policy. Zhang said in a 2013 interview that Xi had said, “The fundamental solution to prevent people from secretly leaving the country is to develop production here and raise the living standard of our people as soon as possible.”

Xi Zhongxun’s firsthand visits to the border area and dozens more places in the province culminated in him making an official proposal to the party’s Central Committee in April 1979, urging the transfer of authority to Guangdong to accelerate reform and opening up. In making his case at the party meeting in Beijing, Xi even made an analogy implying that Guangdong was an “independent country,” according to Zhang.

Deng Xiaoping, then paramount leader, gave the nod for three cities in Guangdong — Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou — and Xiamen in neighboring Fujian Province to be designated as the country’s first four “special economic zones” the following year.

Fast forward four decades, and Shatoujiao on the mainland side appears to be flourishing more than Sha Tau Kok on the Hong Kong side. In terms of GDP, Shenzhen surpassed Hong Kong in 2018, and the gap has since widened.

The emergence of Shenzhen was not an accomplishment of Xi’s father alone, of course, but he was one of the key leaders instrumental in laying the foundation for it.

Hong Kong now no longer views Shenzhen as an underdeveloped neighbor but rather as an equal partner.