At the last count, for instance, nearly 60% of the 22000 registered
manufacturing establishments in Hong Kong employed less than 10 workers
each, and there were only some 40 plants with more than 1000 employees.
6.
W
This economic complexity is compounded by ethnic diversity,
both in ownership and employment. Many of the larger firms are, of
course, foreign-owned: by Eritish, Japanose and American interests
particularly (with an apparently growing participation of Peking-owned
enterprises). But while the great mass of the working population is
Chinese, they still include a proportion of first-generation refugees
from mainland China (15% of our pilot sample of factory workers, for
instance, despite the low average age of the group under 30 years).
Among older people, who of course include many employers, regional
connections with particular parts of China are still strong. In spinning,
most of the firms are of Shanghai origin, and we encountered one where
the supervisors spoke Mandarin while their workers spoke Cantonese -
technical instructions being given largely in English. We had ourselves
to find Mandarin, as opposed to Cantonese, interpreters or interviewers
to communicate with workers in some cases. Particularly, again, the
ethnic diversity of ownerships means that employment practices which
are specific to individual firms and trades have been imported, divergently,
on a substantial scale.
7.
Perhaps the more distinctive peculiarity of Hong Kong, however,
considering it as an industrial rather than an "underdeveloped"
Босіету - is that the social-political development which has generally
accompanied industrialisation in non-Communist societies is much
less advanced. Superficially, at any rate, extremes of wealth and
poverty seem more evident than is normal in an industrial economy, and
the proportion of public expenditure in relation to its "national product"
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