3 ideas
The colonial state takes land less by open seizure than by reclassifying it. Cadastral surveys, title registration, and resource monopolies such as camphor turn land held through labor and custom into land held on paper. Settlers who cleared the ground, but hold no recognized documents, become tenants or trespassers on it.
Settlers who clear land with their own bodies come to treat it as part of who they are, not as a commodity. Because the tie is existential, they endure hunger, landlord extraction, and colonial violence rather than leave. That same attachment makes them resist outside rulers and keeps them from simply walking away.
The Hakka pioneers sit in the middle of a chain of displacement. They push into forest claimed by Indigenous peoples, while landlords above them extract rent and a colonial empire above both expropriates their land and finally their sons. Victimhood and intrusion coexist in the same people, depending on which layer of the chain you look at.