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MAURICE FREEDMAN
91. Development in the New Territories has been so massive that the displaced population is not composed exclusively of refugees. Old communities have been resettled. Again, this is not something to be undertaken for the first time in New Territories history, but a novel element of recent removals has been the choice by many of the people resettled to alter their way of life completely by taking up residence in urban blocks of flats and abandoning agriculture for commercial and industrial pursuits. How have they fared? It seems to me that there is an excellent opportunity here for a scholar interested in urban sociology. What kind of community is being created in resettlement blocks? What is a neighbour and how far does one neighbour depend on the other? To what extent are pre-existing loyalties of kinship and village community built into the new networks of relationships? But in fact in raising these matters my report has come to a point at which research in the New Territories can no longer be discussed separately from research in the Colony as a whole; for if there is to be planning for investigations into urban and industrial subjects then it must be done on a basis which ignores the formal boundary between the New Territories and the rest of Hong Kong. Social organisation within factories; the growth of an entrepreneurial class within industry; kaifongs; voluntary associations such as those based on surname, origin in China, and trade; the family and marriage in an urban setting; religious life in the city—all these are topics which are relevant now to both the old urban areas and parts of the New Territories, and I do not think I should be justified here in making detailed recommendations for research involving the whole Colony.
92. On the other hand, there is a kind of urban sociology which is specifically relevant to the New Territories: the study of small towns. And I should like to suggest that an investigation carried out in, say, Tai Po would greatly enhance our understanding of modern social change in the New Territories. The market towns there have not been urban enclaves. They have not formed a frontier between the rural and the urban. They grew out of the countryside, were peopled by countrymen, and, although in some cases outsiders have built up economic centres in them, they remain largely under the control of the rural areas they serve. The country town is in fact the knot that ties many village communities together. Village people have businesses there; local leaders congregate there; information is collected and disseminated there. And despite the