When I first joined the Laidlaw Scholars Programme at HKU, I tended to associate leadership with visible action: leading a team, taking responsibility for a project, or speaking confidently in front of others. My first year of Laidlaw research gradually changed that understanding. Through studying the Gei Wais of Mai Po Wetland, I began to see leadership in a different way—not as a position of authority, but as the ability to navigate complexity, listen to different perspectives, and take responsibility for bringing people and ideas together.
My research began with a conversation that stayed with me. During a class at HKU’s Faculty of Architecture, I had the opportunity to speak with practitioners working on wetland conservation in Hong Kong. I learned about Gei Wais, traditional intertidal shrimp ponds that are not only part of Hong Kong’s cultural history, but also perform important ecological functions. What particularly interested me was the gap between these two dimensions. Although Gei Wais can be understood simultaneously as natural and cultural heritage, they are rarely examined as an integrated heritage landscape.
That conversation became the starting point of my Laidlaw research, which eventually developed into an investigation of how Gei Wais could be conserved while Hong Kong undergoes rapid urban transformation, particularly in the context of the proposed San Tin Technopole.
At first, I thought the main challenge would be collecting enough information. I soon realized that the harder challenge was understanding how different people define the value of the same landscape. For conservation organizations, Gei Wais are important habitats for migratory birds and examples of wetland management. For heritage researchers, they preserve traditional knowledge and a distinctive part of Hong Kong’s fishing and aquaculture history. For planners, they exist within a rapidly changing urban landscape with pressing demands for land, infrastructure, and flood resilience. Local communities and practitioners may have yet another understanding based on lived experience.
This made research itself a form of leadership.
I had to move beyond the comfort of academic literature and actively engage with people who understood the landscape from very different perspectives. Through semi-structured interviews and documentary research, I began to map these perspectives and look for areas where seemingly competing interests could potentially meet. My interviews included conservation practitioners and researchers, while my wider research also considered the perspectives of government authorities, local communities, and other stakeholders. Rather than searching for a single answer, I learned to ask better questions: What does each stakeholder value? What knowledge might be missing from the discussion? Where can common interests be identified?
This experience also taught me that leadership requires humility. As a student researcher, I was not the person making decisions about the future of Mai Po or San Tin. I did not have the authority to tell stakeholders what should happen. My role was instead to listen carefully, understand different forms of expertise, and connect them through a research framework. I learned that not having authority does not mean having no responsibility. In fact, it makes the responsibility to listen and represent perspectives accurately even more important.
The research also pushed me to become more comfortable with uncertainty. The more I learned about Gei Wais, the less appropriate a simple conservation-versus-development narrative seemed. A wetland could simultaneously be a habitat, a cultural landscape, a historical livelihood system, and potentially part of future blue-green infrastructure. My task was therefore not to eliminate these tensions, but to understand them and explore whether they could be reconciled through more inclusive approaches.
This became particularly important when I explored the possibility of adapting Gei Wai principles into multifunctional retention ponds within the San Tin Technopole. The proposal was not simply about preserving the past. It asked whether traditional ecological knowledge could inform contemporary urban resilience, while new technologies could support the continued operation and interpretation of this heritage. The research therefore became an exercise in connecting rather than choosing: connecting natural and cultural heritage, tradition and innovation, conservation and urban development, and local knowledge with contemporary planning.
Looking back, I now understand leadership less as being the person at the front and more as being willing to step into complexity. It can mean asking a difficult question, listening to someone whose perspective differs from yours, connecting knowledge across disciplines, or making sure that a voice is not overlooked.
My Leadership in Action project has been postponed to the following year, so my understanding of leadership is still evolving. But my first year of Laidlaw research has already given me an important foundation. It has taught me that leadership can begin long before we are given a title or a team to lead. Sometimes, it begins simply with the willingness to listen, to learn, and to take responsibility for how we use what we have learned.