Recommendations put forward as Enclosure I (i.e. pages 5 to 13) of the McDouall-Heenan Report, 1965 (Hong Kong: Government Press, 1967; Code No.: 0339105) hereinafter referred to simply as the Report. Accordingly, while the Sub-Committee has not hesitated to put forward suggestions of its own where it has regarded these as desirable, it has not attempted to draw up an exhaustive treatise on the substantial legal and social questions surrounding the subject of Chinese marriages as a whole, and the present report should not be taken in that sense.
4. For the convenience of those who may read the present report, it was decided that it should be written as a commentary on the Report under consideration, though the members of the Sub-Committee would wish to make it clear that they would not have chosen the same approach to the subject as that used by the authors of the Report, had they been in a position to consider the matter de novo. For this reason a certain amount of repetition has been unavoidable, and the order in which particular issues have been dealt with by the Sub-Committee has not always been an ideal one. Moreover, the Sub-Committee found it necessary to precede its detailed consideration of the Report with some intro- ductory remarks (paras. 5 to 19); thereafter the New Recommen- dations of the Report and the Sub-Committee's own suggestions are considered in detail one by one.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
5. The Sub-Committee did not find itself in any radical dis- agreement with most of the basic policy assumptions of the authors of the Report. It agreed that the Report started from a realistic and proper standpoint in recognizing that major changes in thinking about marriage in the Chinese community in Hong Kong come about as the result of the development of social thought in general within the community, and could not be imposed from without by a Government which in fact largely stands outside the Chinese community. Moreover, in a small community such as that of Hong Kong which possesses few of the attributes of a politically, economically or culturally autonomous society, it must be accepted that many of the influences shaping social thought come from
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