Last Friday’s inauguration of Tsai Ing-wen as Taiwan’s first female president emphasized two core messages to both its domestic audience and the rest of the world. First, Taiwan is a diverse and unique society unlike any other, with its own identity. And second, the Taiwanese people do not intend to relinquish their hard-earned democracy and freedom.

“Once again, the people of Taiwan have shown the world through our actions that we, as a free and democratic people, are committed to the defense of our freedom and democracy as a way of life,” Tsai said to a supportive audience of thousands outside the presidential palace under the hot Taipei sun. “Each and every one of us participated in this journey. My dear fellow Taiwanese, we did it.”

Speaking with confidence and conviction, Tsai, who had been sworn two hours earlier, succinctly summed up the Taiwanese people’s expectation of her administration: “to solve problems”.

The main lens through which international media tend to view Taiwan is the country’s China problem. Beijing claims Taiwan as a province and threatens military reprisal should it formally declare independence. 

Unfortunately for Taiwan, China is the least of its immediate problems. 

A generation of youth have watched living costs skyrocket over the past decade, while wages have stagnated. This former Asian Tiger is now over-reliant on China and struggling to achieve even low growth figures. The country’s population is rapidly aging, while the birth rate remains low. 

Tsai took the reins from Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT), whose eight years as president began with a mandate to improve Taiwan’s economy by upgrading relations with China in the wake of the Chen Shui-bian presidency, which ran from 2000 to 2008. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) like Tsai, Chen was Taiwan’s first non-KMT president. His administration was hamstrung domestically by a KMT-controlled Legislative Yuan and allegations of corruption and across the strait by a standoffish Beijing.

Ma delivered on his promise of better ties with China, but his dismal approval ratings at the end of his second term suggest voters’ remorse among many Taiwanese.

“Ma’s presidency is a mixed bag,” said Jonathan Sullivan an expert on Taiwan’s relations with China at the University of Nottingham. “The tone of cross-strait relations is the highest ever, but the underlying military threat from China is undiminished. The economy has done well considering the global financial crisis, but Taiwanese society is more unequal and suffering from greater feelings of relative deprivation than ever before.”

After the shock of losing Taiwan’s second-ever presidential election to Chen and the DPP, the KMT chose to position itself as the only party that could manage relations with China’s ruling Communist Party. This culminated in last year’s “historic” handshake between Ma and Xi Jinping in Singapore.

The KMT move toward its historic enemy was viewed with cynicism by many Taiwanese who remember the White Terror, four decades of martial law under the KMT in which suspicion of collaborating with the Communists meant prison or death. 

The cornerstone of Ma’s relations with China rested upon the so-called “1992 Consensus” attributed to a 1992 cross-strait conference in Hong Kong in which representatives from Taiwan and China agreed that there is one China, but each side’s interpretation of “one China” may differ. In Beijing’s eyes, the 1992 Consensus forms the bedrock of a status quo that must remain unchanged.

However, former KMT legislator Su Chi said in 2006 that he made up the term “1992 Consensus” in order to placate China before the KMT handed the presidency to Chen.

In the run-up to Tsai’s inauguration, Beijing demanded that Tsai acknowledge the 1992 Consensus, often making not-so-thinly-veiled threats. Earlier this month, Ma Xiaoguang, the spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing, emphasised that “those who change the status quo will be responsible for relations reaching a deadlock or crisis.”

In her first speech as president, an undaunted Tsai addressed domestic priorities for more than 20 minutes before directly mentioning China, although there were indirect references. With the economy at the top of her list, she did speak about a “new model for economic development” that will “bid farewell to our past overreliance on a single market”, i.e. China, Taiwan’s top trading partner. 

Tsai also touched upon improving Taiwan’s social safety net and working with civil society to strengthen democratic institutions. Given that the DPP controls Taiwan’s legislature for the first time ever, there should be significant movement in these areas and others in the coming months. 

Tsai also announced the forthcoming establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission within the presidential office to promote “transitional justice” - a key theme of her campaign. This is likely to be viewed by some in the KMT as a vehicle for further weakening its political clout. Tsai’s stated goal of reducing partisan divisions in Taiwan will be tested early.

When the time to discuss relations with China arrived, Tsai did not utter the phrases “1992 Consensus” or “One China”, nor did she mention the “status quo”. 

Expressing a desire to improve relations with China through dialogue and communication, she urged the promotion of cross-strait relations based upon “existing realities and political foundations”. Among these foundations, she said, were that the “1992 talks” were an acknowledgement of setting aside differences to seek common ground. Taiwan’s constitutional order, the past 20 years of cross-strait negotiations and, most importantly, the democratic expression of the will of the Taiwanese people were also part of the deal, she said.

While not striking a provocative tone, Tsai did not sound willing to negotiate these points.

Hours after Tsai’s speech, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office called her omission of the 1992 Consensus an “incomplete test sheet”, warning that “Taiwanese compatriots are related to us by flesh and blood, there is no force capable of separating us.”

After explaining Taiwan’s position to Beijing, Tsai pivoted toward the international community, calling for deeper relations with “friendly democracies including the United States, Japan and Europe to advance multifaceted cooperation on the basis of shared values.” 

During the two hours between Tsai’s swearing-in and her presidential address, the audience took in several performances expounding upon Taiwan’s unique identity. A music and dance history of the island highlighted its complex ethnic diversity, with the implication that Taiwan is more than just “Chinese”. 

A stirring rock performance, some of it in the local Taiwanese language that the KMT had once banned, highlighted the importance of peaceful protest in the evolution of Taiwan’s democracy. It crescendoed with a large float honoring the Sunflower Movement of 2014 passing in front of the presidential palace. Contrasting with the assault on civil society in China and deteriorating freedoms in Hong Kong, this was also a declaration that as a society, Taiwan is not “Chinese”.

By calling on the US and Japan in particular to deepen cooperation within the context of growing tensions over the East and South China Seas, which are separated by Taiwan, Tsai is sending a clear signal that the possibility of a deeper partnership is there — if Washington and Tokyo want it. 

Hooligan Sparrow, the powerful documentary debut by Chinese director Wang Nanfu (王男栿) opened the 15th installment of Taipei’s annual Urban Nomad indie film festival on May 12. It was the first screening of the film in the Chinese-speaking world, and is unlikely to ever be shown publicly in China. Centering around the arranged rape of six schoolgirls by officials in Hainan province and state efforts to intimidate the brave women fighting the coverup, this film is beyond toxic for a Chinese government obsessed with media control and "positive energy". In Hong Kong, where there is greater political expression than mainland China, the recent and ongoing chilling of political protest and expression suggest the chances of it being shown to large audiences there are low.

From the film’s opening scenes, it becomes clear that Wang herself has become a part of the story, whether she intended to or not. She’s being eyed menacingly by several men - plainclothes cops? - suspicious of her and her camera outside a government building. This scene cuts to Wang in what appears to be a hotel room speaking directly to the camera, preparing to meet state security while wearing a wire. The screen goes black, and grainy audio allows the audience to listen in as Wang lies about what she had been doing over the previous several months: documenting one of China’s most famous feminist activists - Ye Haiyan (叶海燕).

Using video from her handheld camera as well as eyeglasses equipped with a micro camera and occasionally surreptitiously recorded audio, Wang shines a spotlight on the dark and hydra-like nature of state efforts to silence those seeking basic justice in today’s China. Paranoia rules in Hooligan Sparrow: seemingly helpful people are most likely impostors and others who make unsettling first impressions turn out to be kind and brave. On multiple occasions, Wang returns to her footage to discover that seemingly new entrants into the plot had already made earlier appearances. In this unreleased scene from her film, she discovers an unidentified man who is literally on a windowsill outside Ye's office, pressing his ear against the glass.

​Taipei was the most logical place for Wang to show her film in this part of the world, precisely because it is not China. Hooligan Sparrow is a searing indictment of the Chinese government’s full-on assault on any threat to its authority, be it real or perceived. It is told through the lens of the dismal state of women’s rights under the patriarchal Communist Party of China. Women have next to no voice in the halls of power in Beijing. Among the 25-member Politburo that sits atop the party’s power structure, only two women can be counted. At this group’s apex, the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, led by neo-Maoist Xi Jinping, are all men.

In stark contrast, Taiwanese society is vastly more respectful to women and open to their empowerment. This is a point that was highlighted with the inauguration of Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, on May 20. The importance of respecting women's equality to men - as well as acknowledging that Taiwan can still do a better job of it - is a message seen everywhere in daily life here. Posters in public spaces and bars promote an anti-sexual harassment message, while designated areas of subway platforms are reserved as safe waiting zones for women at night. Above all, participation by women in politics in Taiwan is surpassed only by Scandinavian countries.

It's a different world in China, where five feminists were detained in March of last year on the eve of International Women’s Day for a planned protest against sexual harassment on public transportation. Their offence: “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all term that has been used to devastating effect across civil society to justify the disappearing of activists, scholars and lawyers. In Xi's China, feminism is state subversion.

Among the activists who have fallen afoul of authorities for seeking improvements of women’s rights - as well as migrant worker rights - is the indomitable Ye Haiyan. With gritty determination, a knack for slogans and an intuitive grasp of the power of social media, Ye leads a small group of womens’ rights activists in a campaign aimed at shaming the Chinese government into prosecuting the 2013 rape of six schoolgirls - aged 11 to 14 - by two local officials in the island province of Hainan. Their rapes were arranged by the principal of the school they were attending, who personally rented the hotel rooms. Ye allowed Wang to document her efforts to bring the officials and principal to justice, understanding the importance of recording what transpire for others to witness.

Prior to the campaign for justice in Hainan, Ye had already felt the glare of the national spotlight when she volunteered herself as a free prostitute in a campaign to highlight the plight of Chinese sex workers. She became known online as “Hooligan Sparrow” (流氓燕), a nickname that lends Wang’s film its title. 

Ye and the humble sparrow share a history of government persecution. The sparrow was sentenced to extermination nationwide by Mao Zedong in 1958 under his disastrous “Four Pests” campaign, in which it was every Chinese man, woman and child’s duty to help exterminate all sparrows in China, along with flies, mosquitoes and rats.

The anti-sparrow campaign was as ludicrous as it was tragic. Nests and eggs were destroyed and sparrows that weren’t shot in flight were harassed by noisy crowds banging pots and pans until the helpless birds fell to earth in exhaustion. In Mao’s eyes, the sparrows’ crime was eating grain seeds, but what he failed to grasp was that the bird also ate insects that ate grain seeds as well. The near-extinction of the sparrow was a disaster, resulting in ballooning populations of locusts and other insects, and sowing the seeds of ecological imbalance that contributed to massive famines in the early 1960s in which tens of millions of Chinese perished.

The campaign against Hooligan Sparrow depicted in Wang’s film is equally ludicrous. The tactics used against Ye, who is accompanied by her unflappable and wise-beyond-her-years 13-year-old daughter, Yaxin, are reminiscent of the anti-sparrow campaign. Echoing the sad sparrow of the Mao years, Ye is unable to live in peace. She is evicted by her landlord without explanation, turned away from hotels, detained by police and harassed by hired thugs who may as well be banging on pots and pans as they threaten her and Yaxin at their doorstep. 

Unlike Mao’s campaign, which mobilized all Chinese, the instruments of Ye’s harassment are uniformly male, from police in both uniform and plain clothes flouting the law on camera to obfuscating officers at detention centers to hired thugs. Eventually, this Sparrow has no choice but to abandon most of her belongings and flee China’s south to the only place that will take her, the village where she was raised in Hubei province, in the country’s heartland.

Among those “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” along with Ye is Wang Yu, an activist lawyer who features prominently in the film and who has been in detention since July 2015, a fate shared by almost all of China’s weiquan (维权), or “rights defense”, lawyers. ​

Calm, determined and thoughtful, the former commercial lawyer has also defended Falungong adherents and the imprisoned Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti. To the casual observer, Wang, no relation to the film’s director, may appear to embody the Chinese saying “throwing an egg against a rock” (以卵投石) - overestimating one’s strength in the face of a superior adversary. However, as she accurately notes in Hooligan Sparrow, even if she loses every case, by forcing the government to make a case for its actions, she and other weiquan lawyers are still acting as a check on government power. Today she is still paying the price for her small but important victories. 

Calm and composed as she attempts to secure justice for the raped schoolgirls - and freedom for a detained Ye - Wang loses her composure only once in the film. Noting that the Hainan case is not an isolated incident and that the procurement and rape of underage girls to secure favors from government officials has become “fashionable” in today’s China, Wang is unable to prevent a couple of tears from falling from her eyes. 

Hooligan Sparrow, like Mao’s anti-sparrow campaign, does not have a happy ending. In effect, “sparrows” such as Ye and Wang are on the verge of extinction in today’s China. This point is hammered home after the  final scene, as the names and photos of the rights crusaders featured in the film are accompanied by their respective jail terms. Particularly jarring is the image of Wang Yu, who minutes earlier was using her freedom of movement to fight for justice, as she is still in detention.

As for Wang Nanfu, who is based in New York City, she has not returned to China since the release of Hooligan Sparrow, which was featured in competition at Sundance this year. Speaking with the audience after the first screening of her film in Taipei, she acknowledged the uncertainty that now clouds her future with her home country.

"The worst outcome of this could be I can't return to China," she said. "Or, I can return, but I can't leave."

Hooligan Sparrow will make its New York City debut on June 10 at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2016 at Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater.

A few years ago I was sent to the city of Changchun in northeast China’s Jilin province for a business story. One of the people I needed to interview for my article was an engineer at the headquarters of First Automobile Works (FAW), one of China’s large state-owned automakers.

The engineer, in his late 50s, was responsible for resurrecting FAW’s luxury line, Red Flag, once the automobile of choice among Communist officials. After China opened up to the world and cadres discovered how much nicer Audis were, Red Flag was all but forgotten – an embarrassing symbol of how ‘made in China’ couldn’t compete with the developed world. I started my voice recorder and began the interview.

“So, what have you done to make Red Flag more competitive with Audi and other foreign luxury carmakers?” I asked him from across his desk in his office.

He leaned back in his chair, gazing pensively at the ceiling behind me and proceeded to completely ignore my question.

“You know,” he said with a pause, “on weekends I like to drive through the countryside.”

“Uh, sure.”

“And now, everywhere I look, I see nothing but pointless real estate projects that are being built on what was once good farmland.”

“Right, so regarding the new and improved Red Flag…”

“Arable land is the most important resource a country has, why are we destroying it unnecessarily?”

Slightly thrown off, I managed to get the engineer back on topic and finished the interview. Irrelevant to my story as they were, his words come back to me often ever since I moved to a village in Hong Kong’s New Territories.

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The rural area where I’ve been based since early 2013 is a narrow strip of land with densely populated towns featuring high-rise apartment buildings and shopping malls on one side and the mountainous restricted area that separates mainland China and Hong Kong on the other.

Having spent nearly all of the past 13 years in crowded mainland cities, I was thrilled to move to what felt like genuine countryside. I cycle everywhere I go, hike in verdant hills and never hear the sound of construction -- which defined my last few years in China.

Best of all, there is a village nearby where I can buy fresh, locally grown, chemical-free produce. Despite being called Ma Shi Po (Cantonese for “Horseshit Place”), it is a pleasant collection of small farms, with no horses or horse droppings to be found.

After years of laziness, eating most of my meals at restaurants, or finishing leftovers at home, I am once again cooking for myself. Over the past year I have been lucky enough to have access to fresh seasonal vegetables such as salad greens, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, squash, cucumber, okra, broccoli, cabbage, sweet potatoes, beetroot, cauliflower, chili peppers and more, all basically organic. As a vegetarian, I have been happier than the proverbial pig in shit.

After a couple of months of living in my newfound veggie paradise, I learned from one of the villagers that Ma Shi Po’s days were numbered, it was going to be converted to more apartments and shopping malls. I experienced the same sinking feeling that I’d felt so often in China when old or historical buildings were destroyed or when chengzhongcun, or “urban villages”, had been cleared for real estate megaprojects.

Ma Shi Po is on the northern edge of Luen Wo Hui, a town in Hong Kong’s Fanling area in the northern New Territories. The Hong Kong government has been working for years on pushing its Northeast New Territories New Development Areas (NENT NDA for short) project forward and is nearing the final stages before construction commences.

Ma Shi Po and several other villages are located within the land designated for the NENT NDA. Under the first phase of the US$15.5 billion plan, 60,000 new apartments will be built for more than 170,000 people. The first apartments are projected to come online in 2022.

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Hong Kong has some of the world’s highest rents, a burden that weighs heavy on everyone here who isn’t well-off. Much attention has been paid in the past couple of years to people living in 'shoebox homes' or even literally living in cages like animals because that is all they are able to afford. These are working people with jobs. Following the global trend toward greater income disparity, 20 percent of Hong Kong’s population of more than seven million is now considered impoverished.

The Hong Kong government subsidizes housing for more than half of the territory’s population, but there are still tens of thousands in the queue for so-called public housing that does not yet exist. There is no doubt that Hong Kong needs more public housing. Sixty percent of the new apartments to be built under NENT NDA are designated to be public housing, but six years is a long time for people to wait.

In the meantime, 6,000 or more villagers, mostly older farmers, will be dislodged from an area that comprises one-third of Hong Kong’s remaining 1,000 hectares of arable land that is currently being utilized for agricultural production. I recently asked one of the villagers at risk in Ma Shi Po what her and her family’s backup plan was, and as tears welled up in her eyes, she said they didn’t have one. With an aging grandmother and parents who are lifelong farmers, their prospects in Hong Kong’s highly competitive job market are grim.

After speaking with different residents of Ma Shi Po I realized how precarious their situation is. Most are middle-aged or elderly, a few are in their 20s, but they all have the same thing in common: they are renting the land they farm, so none of them have a legal basis for challenging plans to destroy the village. For developers, large-scale greenfield development is much more cost effective and profitable than building one building at a time in places which would allow local agriculture to continue. Therefore villagers such as those in Ma Shi Po must be swept aside.

The role of developers in Hong Kong’s economy is hard to understate. Most of Hong Kong’s billionaires are involved in property, including Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing of Cheung Kong Holdings, as well as the Kwok brothers of Sun Hung Kai, Cheng Yu-teng of New World Development and Lee Shau-kee of Henderson Land Development.

Hong Kong’s top official, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, is a former surveyor and developer (he is the 'Leung' in DTZ Debenham Tie Leung, now known as DTZ). Leung and other property tycoons (former or current) including Li Ka-shing, Cheng Yu-teng and Lee Shau-kee have been given Hong Kong’s highest civilian honor, the Grand Bauhinia Medal. Land developers even have the right to vote in Hong Kong’s legislature via the real estate and construction seat under the territory’s functional constituency scheme, which enables certain industries that are deemed important to the economy to have direct representation in the local government.

Henderson Land has been particularly active in purchasing land in the areas to be developed by the government under the NENT NDA plan. According to research by JP Morgan, Henderson Land has acquired 2.7 million square feet of land within the area that is slated for development. Should the plan move forward according to schedule, JP Morgan estimates that Henderson Land could collect HKD2.1 billion to 3.2 billion (US$270.8 million to 412.7 million) from selling the land to the government.

Villagers I’ve spoken with estimate that Henderson already owns 90 percent of Ma Shi Po. In recent weeks they say Henderson has moved drills used for geological surveying into Ma Shi Po – jumping the gun a bit, considering that the NENT NDA plan has yet to be formally passed by the government, although that appears likely. These gas-powered drills have brought an ominous noise to the once-peaceful village. For Ma Shi Po residents, especially the older ones, the drills and a recent government seizure of one of the farms have injected a sense of impending doom into the once-bucolic village. One villager in her 50s said she’s having trouble sleeping now and has lost more than 10 pounds in two weeks from constant worry. The younger villagers, who should be able to find some kind of work elsewhere if evicted, are no longer their chipper selves.

With no legal recourse against the NENT NDA, Ma Shi Po’s villagers have done their best to reach out to their fellow Hongkongers with the hope that with enough public opinion on their side, the NENT NDA could be shifted to other land not currently used for farming, such as the numerous lots used for scrap, parking and storage nearby.

The biggest potential source of alternative development land, however, is the 125-year-old Hong Kong Golf Club, which leases 176 hectares of land in Fanling from the local government for one Hong Kong dollar, or 13 US cents, per year. There are five other private golf clubs in Hong Kong, but many of the city’s wealthier residents believe building apartments on the Fanling course, which hosts the Hong Kong Open, would be devastating to the territory’s international image. There has been some government discussion of developing the course instead, none of it very serious.

The odds are certainly stacked against the villagers of Ma Shi Po. However, the lone weapon in their PR arsenal is a potent one: Hongkongers’ fear of mainland Chinese produce. The steady drumbeat of food safety scandals on the mainland, which is the largest supplier of vegetables to Hong Kong, has driven many young people, families and restaurants to Ma Shi Po and other villages in search of safe local produce. This has garnered the villagers a small but loyal support base.

Ma Shi Po villagers have petitioned the government and made their case for saving Hong Kong’s remaining farmland at public consultations and other government meetings related to the development plan. But so far the NENT NDA juggernaut cannot be stopped.

On April 14, tired of feeling helpless and refusing to give up hope, a handful of Ma Shi Po villagers plus some of their supporters from areas such as Sheung Shui and Yau Ma Tei visited an apartment building in Hong Kong Island’s pricey Mid-levels where Henderson Land’s Lee – Hong Kong’s third richest man, valued at US$20.3 billion – supposedly lives while his home on Victoria Peak is being renovated. In addition to a banner and signs, they also brought a loudspeaker and a recording of Henderson’s drills at work in Ma Shi Po, plus pots, pans and ladles.

Just before 6pm, the 20-plus protestors occupied the private drive of the building and began their brief, peaceful demonstration, which would last all of 20 minutes. A young woman used the loudspeaker to explain to passersby the plight of Ma Shi Po and the importance of local agriculture to Hong Kong. Then she asked the woman from the village who has been losing sleep and weight to speak about Ma Shi Po, where she was born and has lived her entire life. Speaking steadily at first, she soon burst into tears, as did her daughter, who embraced her as her mother continued to speak. I’d discussed the NENT NDA with both of these women before and they had never shown anything but a steely determination to stop it. Seeing them cry was unexpected and jarring.

While the apartment building’s security guards took photos and video and phoned the police, the loudspeaker was used to play a recording of Henderson’s drilling activity in Ma Shi Po as demonstrators banged pots and pans with ladles. To pedestrians walking by or tourists on the Peak Tram a few meters away, it must have seemed a surreal hybrid of noise rock and Cantonese opera. This lasted five minutes, after which the protesters chanted several times:

Stop the drilling!

Stop the relocation!

Rent out the farmland!

Return the land to the farmers!

And then it was over. It is unlikely that Lee heard the noise down below, if he was even home. He probably didn’t see the poster of his likeness with devil horns that proclaimed Henderson Land a “Village Killer”.

The demonstration had blocked two cars which were trying to exit the apartment complex and one that was trying to enter. The drivers and passengers waited patiently and politely after they were told that one of their neighbors was involved in the destruction of a village in which some of the protesters lived.

Both of Hong Kong’s free television stations were present, as were local independent media. In a path next to the Peak Tram tracks, the villagers held an impromptu press conference. Lightened by the catharsis of having their voices heard for a fleeting moment, everyone walked down the hill toward Chater Garden, where, exhausted both emotionally and physically, they sat on the ground and rested in the shadows of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscrapers. White-collar office workers talking on their iPhones streamed around them as they shared dried fruits and nuts.

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It will take a miracle to save Ma Shi Po, and the villagers appear to be doing all they can to create one. But the Hong Kong development machine appears to be unstoppable. Even if the villagers do manage to find new farmland – they say they’re not interested in the fallow plots with limited access that the government is offering them as compensation – it’s difficult to say with any certainty that they’ll be able to work that land for long.

It seems that the rest of the remaining farmland in Hong Kong will be developed in the coming years. On April 12, the government unveiled plans to convert 152 hectares of rural land in Yuen Long district into a town with 33,700 apartments for more than 90,000 residents. When told that Hongkongers have less and less of an appetite for development of the territory’s rural areas, one Town Planning Board member brushed the comment off, saying that development of Hong Kong’s rural areas was “inevitable”.

Hong Kong currently imports 90 percent of its food. As the government moves to develop what little arable land remains, which can act as a short-term buffer when mainland food crises hit, it is also unbanning toxic substances from imported produce. This all but guarantees mainland produce with an even larger majority of the Hong Kong market.

Theoretically this former British colony is guaranteed autonomy until 2047. But losing the last vestiges of food security will render that autonomy increasingly superficial. Soon, Hong Kong too will understand that engineer's lament over the needless destruction of farmland.

Walking to an interview on a gorgeous afternoon in Phnom Penh today I was distracted by a column of several dozen protesters with motorcycle and tuk-tuk escorts making their way off Rue de Pasteur onto Samdech Pan (Street 214).

As motos and tuk-tuks sounded their horns, the protesters chanted as they marched with flags, lots of flags. The Cambodian flag was most prominent, followed by the Buddhist flag (see leftmost flag in the above image), but the banners of the EU, US, Japan, South Korea and Germany, among others, were also flown.

This small-scale march was an attempt to call domestic and international attention to the plight of 23 activists, union leaders and laborers involved in the garment worker strike and protests that climaxed the morning of January 3, when police shot and killed four protesters. The workers were demanding a pay rise from $80 per month to $160 per month for their sweatshop labor, which produces garments for companies including Gap, H&M, and Levi's. Garments account for 80 percent of Cambodia's exports.

On January 8, the government announced that the jailed protesters were being held in Kampong Cham's Correctional Center 3, which is famous for poor treatment of inmates. Several of the jailed are reportedly suffering from injuries sustained during beatings before and after their detention.

The day after the crackdown in Phnom Penh's garmentmaking district, military police and plainclothes gangs cleared hundreds of opposition protesters from Freedom Park, after which the government, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, banned further demonstrations. However, two weeks later this tiny demonstration shows how difficult it will be for Hun Sen to make the issues of last year's questionable elections and resentment toward government corruption just go away.

Hun Sen leads the Cambodian People's Party, which has ruled the Kingdom since the Vietnamese overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. A former Khmer Rouge soldier himself, he is generally regarded as a dictator.

Back to the demonstration, most of those who were on foot donned photos of jailed protesters on their heads. The photos featured the names of the protesters as well as Khmer- and English-language calls for their release.

The government may have quashed demonstrations by garment workers and opposition supporters, but as today's small protest suggests, Cambodians have not been completely scared off the streets. It seems highly unlikely that Hun Sen's government will not have to deal with large-scale protests again during the remaining four-plus years of his current term.