2.
5. From early days in Hong Kong various kaifong have also from time to time done a great deal to promote primary education. Another of their traditional undertakings was of a semi-religious kind when they organised holiday festivals on the anniversary of an important deity, or arranged processions to avert or diminish the effects of some great disaster which might be attributable to some god's negligence or anger.
6. But during the twenty years before the war the old kaifong in Hong Kong gradually died away in most of the urban areas. In some districts the whole thing was apparently forgotten. In others the tradition became at best a half-hearted affair kept up by a few individuals. Repairing public bridges and mending roads had long been the responsibility of the official Public Works Department. The provision of free medical aid had been increasingly undertaken by yet other civil servants or concentrated in large voluntary Western-style institutions or in the Tung Wah Hospitals., Though it is interesting that that venerable and purely Chinese charitable organisation (the Tung Wah group of Hospitals) has not only always provided free medical aid for those in need but has carried out another traditional kaifong activity in their supply of free coffins and in their arrangements for free burials for the poor.
7. By 1941 very little indeed was being heard of the kaifong. The Japanese occupation apparently put the final touches to their disappearance. After 1945 the last remaining Chinese Public Dispensaries were taken over by the Medical Department. In the whole of urban Hong Kong and Kowloon there was only one pre-war Kaifong of any importance which was trying to struggle into life again.
8. I have spent some time on these old kaifong because they are amongst the most important ancestors of the present-day Kaifong Welfare Associations and similar bodies. In spite of a somewhat chequered history in Hong Kong they built up a fine record for certain forms of public service, besides playing a not unimportant part in the Colony's social history.
9. But now we must turn to their successors, of whom you may have read an increasing amount in the (Hong Kong) Chinese and English press during the last two years.
The first of these new associations was started in the densely populated residential, industrial and commercial district of. Shamshuipo on the Kowloon mainland, where some local Chinese gentlemen set to work on two assumptions. They believed that the old kaifong and their traditions of public service were not by any means entirely forgotten, in spite of the evidence of the last twenty years and in spite of Japanese occupation. Also, they realised that social welfare does not mean mere relief work or socially unprofitable mass charity; that it should include a whole network of constructive services aimed at genuinely helping people seek to improve in practical ways their own welfare, and to maintain that improvement. They believed that these two sets of ideas the one looking back to the best traditions of the old kaifong and the other drawn from a broad and constructive Western interpretation of social welfare could be blended together. The whole emphasis of this new Shamshuipo Kaifong Welfare Association and of the fifteen other genuine ones which were to follow, was accordingly to be on practical work by as many residents of a district as possible for their own district and for their fellow-residents. That was
the way the Shamshuipo Association started, and the way that all the other
with a handful of genuine Kaifong Welfare Associations started as well local Chinese meeting together to discuss their ideas for their own district's welfare. It was also perhaps natural that these groups used from the start to ask the Social Welfare Office whether there was any advice or aid which
We did what we could. The it could offer to help them realise their aims. actual development of each Association usually followed a fairly clear pattern. First there was a "t'aam wa wui" or informal discussion group organised by the original sponsors. From this emerged a Preparatory Committee which got down to the hard work of planning and organising a membership campaign, arguing out the form and functions of the proposed Association, drafting a
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