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BOOK REVIEWS
a factory or in petty trade, or some form of out-work, for example making plastic flowers, extremely popular since about 1960. It also affects the future of young members of the boat community since children, once living on the land, can attend school regularly.
Land people have long regarded the boat people as near barbarians and have myths about their "un-Chinese" activities, but Miss Ward argues movement ashore will change their status generally, and in the long run the cumulative effects of all the developments connected with economic change will be to integrate the fishing folk completely into the rest of the Chinese population. Miss Ward's main work has been with the Cantonese speaking fishing folk. One might wonder, however, whether the rate of integration will be the same for the "Hoklo," speaking a different dialect. Land-dwelling speakers of this dialect have still a long way to go to full integration in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong, 1968.
MARJORIE TOPLEY
THE AWAKENING OF CHINA 1793 - 1949: Roger Pelissier (edited and translated by Martin Kieffer) London, Secker and Warburg, 1967, pp 532. 63/-
This book, part of a series entitled "History in the Making", is really a collection of short extracts, few of them more than several pages culled from numerous Western works. English, American and, usefully, (the compiler being of that nationality) French sources form the bulk of the publications from which the selection is made. The extracts are linked by a connecting narrative to form a continuous sequence of historical experience extending from the Macartney Embassy in 1793-94 to the débâcle of 1948 - 49 when the Chinese Communists took over control of all China.
Whilst the narrative is, in places, open to question, this publication deserves to be widely known and read. This is partly because the books from which the extracts are taken are, in most cases, long out of print and sometimes difficult to obtain; but mainly because it provides a superb sweep of modern Chinese history, carefully assembled. The richness of the material is remarkable and the authors are compelling partly, one suspects, because of the vital nature of what lay before their eyes. The writers are