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MAURICE FREEDMAN
among them is very irregular, even when allowance is made for the differences in size between the communities. There are clearly specialisations here, and sets of comparable statistics for other areas would be a necessary preliminary to a study of why, despite the fact that overseas migration has been very general in the New Territories in recent years, some communities have not contributed to it or done so on a very small scale. This problem has often been raised in studies of emigration from southeastern China, but it has never been thoroughly gone into, and it would be a pity if the opportunity to study it in the New Territories were missed.
82. Why do people emigrate? New Territories men do not go abroad to make a new life or even, it would seem, to see the world. They, like millions of men from Fukien and Kwangtung before them, have sought a way of earning a better living; they have not intended to settle abroad (whatever later circumstances and opportunities may have suggested or dictated) and have hoped to be able to return home with enough money to sweeten their old age. Although, as we have seen, a few hundred New Territories women have gone to the United Kingdom to join their men, the general character of the migration has been male. In an ideal pattern, men go abroad, earn, remit money, and return. But a large-scale exodus of able-bodied men entails some serious consequences for the social and economic life of the people left behind. In some areas of the New Territories the absence of young and middle-aged men is so striking as to be obvious even to the casual observer. Inferences from the census data are not easy to draw, because the absence of men from the old-established communities may be marked in the figures by surpluses of men among the new population, but the 1961 data show significantly that of the five Districts Sai Kung has the lowest ratio of males to females (951:1,000) and that within the Tai Po District Sai Kung North and Sha Tau Kok stand out very sharply as areas with low ratios (794 and 782 respectively, whereas the ratio for the District as a whole is 1,019). Moreover, Sai Kung has had a low ratio over a long period (859 in 1921 and 800 in 1931). (See K.M.A. Barnett, Hong Kong, Report on the 1961 Census, vol. II, p. 25, Tables 110 and 111. Population figures, by sex, for individual villages and settlements are available from the 1961 census, although not published in the Report; they provide a valuable guide to the communities from which male emigration has been heaviest, although again, the presence of new