From a plot of land that she has occupied for 38 years while farming fish in Hong Kong’s San Tin area, Lai Kam-dai has watched as Shenzhen grew into a major city across the Sham Chun River. “This is new,” Lai said in Cantonese, pointing at the skyline across the border from Hong Kong. Shenzhen’s population grew from under one million in 1990 to an industrial megacity, currently home to more than 13 million people.
For Lai and her neighbours, Shenzhen’s rapid development is a harbinger of what’s to come in San Tin. The government’s proposed Northern Metropolis development project threatens to transform the agricultural village in Yuen Long into a megalopolis nearly identical to its mainland counterpart. Some 18,000 local residents, including tenant farmers, pond operators, and landowners, must now reckon with the imminent compulsory takeover of their land and their resulting displacement – Lai among them.
This will not be the first time the 70-year-old’s livelihood has been hit by development. Lai’s father worked as a fisherman before moving his family to Tin Shui Wai in 1962, where they took up fish farming. “Back in Tin Shui Wai, the whole family lived together in these wooden houses, and everyone was very poor,” Lai told HKFP through an interpreter.
“So everyone in the family – the adults and kids – would help harvest and sell the fish.” Once Lai married her husband Chan Kwok-sun, now 73, whose family also raised fish, the couple began their .