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"help to reinforce in the young certain clearly-defined modes of behaviour and ways of looking at the world regarded as acceptable to the community”.
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Even after making every allowance for the variable gap between Confucian indoctrination and the degree of acceptance among Chinese individuals, and for human behaviour in practice as opposed to precept, it has seemed to me that some great and tangible quality, part of the legacy of the old order of “right minded-ness” in doing and thinking, had manifested itself in the people of Tsuen Wan in those crucial decades. It was certainly something that made all the difference to the execution of the Hong Kong Government's schemes for developments.
There is, of course, another and more pessimistic view to be taken, which would attribute the people's behaviour less to cultural characteristics and ethical indoctrination than to the fact that they were still part of the "peasant masses". In at least one historian's mind, the **peasant masses** had still in the then fairly recent Republican period:
“continued to be supernumeraries as they had been throughout Chinese history, the anonymous human dough that suffered and submitted, the governed..."
44
resigned to poverty and what it brought as their fate; and that moreover, in a country of whose society Dr. Sun Yat-sen had once quipped that it "was composed of only two classes, the very poor and the less poor". Nevertheless, whilst accepting that poverty and acceptance of fate had undoubtedly played their part in Tsuen Wan's postwar saga, I much prefer an interpretation which is more complex and accommodating; allowing more scope for the human quality that is so visible in this narrative, and for the liveliness and enterprise so abundantly observable in the people who went to live there in those spartan and difficult times.
NOTES
R.O. Joliffe in Yi-fang Wu and Frank W. Price, China Rediscovers Her West, A Symposium (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1942), pp. 20-21. See, too, the almost identical estimate given nearly forty years before by the well-known American missionary Dr. Arthur H. Smith in The Uplift of China (London, Church Missionary Society, 1908), pp. 49-50.
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"help to reinforce in the young certain clearly-defined modes of behaviour and ways of looking at the world regarded as acceptable to the community”.“
43
Even after making every allowance for the variable gap between Confucian indoctrination and the degree of acceptance among Chinese individuals, and for human behaviour in practice as opposed to precept, it has seemed to me that some great and tangible quality, part of the legacy of the old order of “right minded-ness” in doing and thinking, had manifested itself in the people to Tsuen Wan in those crucial decades. It was certainly something that made all the difference to the execution of the Hong Kong Government's schemes for developments.
There is, of course, another and more pessimistic view to be taken, which would attribute the people's behaviour less to cultural characteristics and ethical indoctrination than to the fact that they were still part of the "peasant masses". In at least one historian's mind, the **peasant masses" had still in the then fairly recent Republican period:
“continued to be supernumaries as they had been throughout Chinese history, the anonymous human dough that suffered and submitted, the governed..."
44
++
resigned to poverty and what it brought as their fate; and that moreover, in a country of whose society Dr. Sun Yat-sen had once quipped that it "was composed of only two classes, the very poor and the less poor". Nevertheless, whilst accepting that poverty and acceptance of fate had undoubtedly played their part in Tsuen Wan's postwar saga, I much prefer an interpretation which is more complex and accommodating; allowing more scope for the human quality that is so visible in this narrative, and for the liveliness and enterprise so abundantly observable in the people who went to live there in those spartan and difficult times.
NOTES
R.O. Joliffe in Yi-fang Wu and Frank W. Price, China Rediscovers Her West, A Symposium (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1942), pp. 20-21. See, too, the almost identical estimate given neary forty years before by the well-known American missionary Dr. Arthur H. Smith in The Uplift of China (London, Church Missionary Society, 1908). pp. 49-50.
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