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MAURICE FREEDMAN
will be overlooked in future studies. The Hoklo-speaking group has never been looked into in any detail and might well make the subject of an interesting investigation—partly because their spoken language appears to have acted as a barrier which administrators have found it difficult to cross. (There is, however, nothing specially exotic about the language; it can be handled by anybody with some background in one of the Min dialects—Amoy, Chiu Chau, etc.) On the other hand, it seems to me that the accent in studies of fishermen should fall heavily on modern developments. Among boat people there seems to be an increasing drift to the land for dwellings; fishermen have joined in the emigration to the United Kingdom; marriages have been noted, perhaps on a growing scale, between Tanka and landsmen; and there are many signs that the separation of boat people from land-based institutions is likely to diminish progressively. (I do not know enough about the boat people who are not fishermen to include them in my remarks). How these processes are taking place and how the modern fishing industry promotes and reacts to the changes are matters on which both the New Territories Administration and the Co-operative Development and Fisheries Department must have collected a great deal of information, and there is a case to be made for someone to prepare an analysis of the available data as a step towards detailed on-the-spot studies.
94. Fishermen are not the only marginal groups in the New Territories. While great areas of the countryside have undergone economic development it is still possible to walk over tracks which suggest the Ch'ing dynasty rather than the twentieth century into villages where only packets of cigarettes, photographs, and the odd transistor wireless set forbid the illusion that one has stepped back into a fully traditional Chinese community. And in the island settlements the sense of the new world kept at a distance is reinforced by the sea. In reality no community in the New Territories is today isolated, but many, because of their poor communications, are remote, and, given that roads are being planned which will bring new possibilities of marketing crops and attract the attention of outsiders to areas now ignored, there is a need to study communities in the process of being brought closer to the mainstream of contemporary New Territories life. If there had been enough talent immediately available for research I should have suggested that such a study be undertaken at once, but it will probably have to be put aside for a while.