SOCIAL RESEARCH in the N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963
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the agricultural revolution. Socially they have helped to swamp parts of the New Territories with factories and blocks of flats. They are now an integral part of local life as a whole, but in so far as they remain on the fringes of old-established communities they merit some special attention from the anthropologist who is interested in problems of assimilation. The problem in the New Territories has many sides to it: economic, political, educational, and 'social'. On the surface it might seem that many old New Territories settlements have been converted into mixed communities of old and new populations, the newcomers living in the worn out centres of walled villages, in new buildings at the edge of the settlements, and in shacks surrounding them. But some of them are commuters for whom the settlement is just a place to live, and even those whose livelihood is gained on the spot may have little say in the public affairs of the settlement. One may caricature the extreme case by saying that the old inhabitants have abandoned their rice fields to the immigrant market-gardeners and their poorer housing to the newcomers' families, that they have become the supercilious landlords to a new class of sub-citizens, despising them for their virtues of hard work and thrift, and that in the process these old New Territories people are busy dismantling their own rural way of life.
90. Immigration to the New Territories has been so bound up with vegetable-growing and poultry-farming that a useful approach to the general problem might well be through a study of their economics. It would seem that in some places a measure of social cohesion is produced among immigrants by their membership of co-operatives. The study of rents and credit would quickly lead on to the wider relationships between newcomers and their long-established neighbours, showing how far they depend on them and the permanence of the attachment. It is nothing new for people to drift into the New Territories, and there have been earlier examples of people being spurred over the border by political conditions in China; but in its scale and stability the modern influx is so important that it cannot be thought away from the present scene to leave only traditional communities for study. Of course, the task of surveying and investigating the heterogeneous new population would be formidable, but we might well aim at a community or two which would include sizeable segments of it. This at least would be a beginning.