[
    {
        "id": 208096,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 135,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "“LITTLE FUJIAN (FUKIEN)”\n\n119\n\nNorth Point to explore that other aspect of the \"ethnic neighborhood\": the sense of community.\n\nLittle Fujian as Community: Organized Ethnicity\n\nFormal associations are not a major aspect of Fujianese ethnicity in Hong Kong; few Fujianese belong to traditional clan or district organizations in Hong Kong. Considering the extensive literature on the importance of such organizations on Chinese social life at home and abroad (Amyot 1973; McBeath 1973; Freedman 1958; Li 1970; Skinner 1958) this phenomenon is surprising. Yet a careful consideration of Little Fujian's demographic profile would cause us to be severely shocked if such organizations did exist in Hong Kong in full flower, for the bulk of Little Fujian's population has always consisted of women and their children. With the wealthiest, most prestigious and greatest numbers of adult-aged men residing not in Hong Kong but the Philippines and elsewhere where such organizations do indeed exist in the proper forms,* few Fujianese think it necessary to establish Hong Kong branches of these male-dominated structures in the essentially \"domestic\" community of Little Fujian.\n\nOther organizations, moreover, do meet the needs of Little Fujian, both as a local community and as the hub of Fujian-Nanyang connections. The two most important such organizations, the Fujian Province Association and the Fujian Commercial Association, cater to the two-tiered demands of Fujianese in Hong Kong and abroad and are by nature more universalist in appeal and function than clan and district associations. Politically aligned with the People's Republic, these \"patriotic\" associations also serve as a sort of semi-official \"Liaison Office” or “Consulate\" to link the Overseas Fujianese of Hong Kong and the Nanyang to the home province.\n\nThe most widely known Fujianese organization, the Fujian Province Association, was originally located in Hong Kong's first Fujianese sub-neighborhood, Sai Ying Poon. The Association, however, followed the Fujianese move to North Point in the early 1960s and has since become the public focus of Fujianese organized\n\n* For instance, the Hon. Editor of this Journal has informed me of a special publication commemorating the 60th anniversary (1901-1961) of the Fuchow association of Sibu, Sarawak (#**#£#*+0+K&#).\n\nPage 135\n\nPage 136",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208097,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 136,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "120\n\nGREGORY E. GULDIN\n\nethnicity in North Point. Primarily concerned with community and social welfare projects, the Association sponsors performances of Fujianese provincial operas, folk dances and songs; organizes film showings and outings to the countryside, operates health clinics, a Guangdongese language program and a Fujianese discount grocery; and arranges for inexpensive trips back home to Fujian (Zheng Yi 1974:2-4).\n\nWith all these services and activities the Fujian Province Association is a genuinely popular and community-wide organization among North Point's Fujianese. All Fujianese are familiar with at least some of its services and activities whether or not they have ever personally visited its offices or benefited from its services. They know that the Association is there to help Fujianese, and especially Southern Fujianese, with the problems of housing, jobs, travel to Fujian and access to Fujianese products. With its 3000 active members (2.3% of the 1975 Fujianese Hong Kong population) the Association serves as the main organizational terminal through which many of little Fujian's ethnic and social currents are strengthened and channeled.\n\nAlthough not physically located in North Point, but in the old Sheung Wan district of Fujianese and other trading corporations, the Fujian Commercial Association has exerted a guiding force in the Fujianese community's development. In addition to facilitating PRC trade with the Overseas Fujianese of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, the Association has acted as the unofficial coordinator of the other pro-PRC Fujianese organizations in Hong Kong.11 Composed of the wealthy, influential and active members of an already unusually depleted older male population, the Commercial Association is usually the prime mover in the few community activities that do occur.\n\nOne such activity, and one in which the Commercial Association's role is most conspicuous, is in the organization and direction of the annual \"All-Fujianese National Day Banquet.\" Although the Fujian Province Association, the Fujian Middle School and the Fujianese Physical Education Association all co-sponsor this \"patriotic\" affair, it is the Commercial Association that foots the bill for the evening and which handles all questions of etiquette and policy. If anything in Hong Kong comes close to being a \"center of Fujianese power,\" the Commercial Association does, diffuse and",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208098,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 137,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "\"LITTLE FUJIAN (Fukien)\"\n\n121\n\nindirect though that power may be. In general, though, and especially when compared to other Chinese \"overseas\" communities, neither the Commercial nor the Province Association dominates the Fujianese community.\n\nLittle Fujian as Community: The Social Networks\n\nEthnicity and community are also expressed in less formally structured ways than associations and organizations. Informal patterns of economic, religious and social behavior have arisen and guide life in Little Fujian to a significant degree. Of these three areas perhaps it is the economic and business aspects of Little Fujian that are most visible to outsiders, more visible because they are public.\n\nIn the retail \"Fujianese markets\" of Chun Yeung and Mercury Streets, Little Fujian as a sub-neighborhood intersects with Little Fujian as social community. Each market street is located along an artery of the Fujianese sub-neighborhood and caters to Fujianese tastes in everything from food to jewellery to clothes. Non-Fujianese (Guangdongese, Chau Zhou and/or Shanghaiese) markets adjoin these Fujianese business areas but are socially as well as physically distinct; most Fujianese women prefer to shop on Chun Yeung or Mercury Street where they can be sure of finding people who sell Fujianese specialties prepared in the right manner and who will bargain with them in a familiar tongue. To younger Fujianese, though, language is not so great a barrier and they will often just as comfortably shop on the adjoining but “Fujianese-less” markets of Marble Road or elsewhere in search of a bargain. Yet even for these frugal shoppers the buying habits of childhood and the chance to meet Fujianese friends pulls them repeatedly back to Chun Yeung and Mercury Streets to buy things Fujianese style.\n\nAs with business, so too has religion developed along ethnic lines in North Point.12 Twenty years ago there were no specifically Fujianese Buddhist temples in North Point and early arrivals frequented the one convenient temple in the area: the predominantly Guangdongese Yuet Fei temple on Electric Road.* During the first decade of Fujianese settlement in North Point the percentage\n\n* The origins of this temple are given in a Hong Kong Government file (Secretariat for Chinese Affairs 1/631/1948) which contains a minute dated 3rd April 1948 by the then Secretary for Chinese Affairs, Mr. R. R. Todd:",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208102,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1977",
        "page_number": 141,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "\"LITTLE FUJIAN (FUKIEN)\"\n\n125\n\nnity\" should be reserved for ethnic social interaction and organization. If this divorce were to be granted it would clear up much confusion in the writings on neighborhood and community. We would thus realize that the disagreement between Joy/Lieberson and Drieger/Church is due to their concern with neighborhood on the one hand and community on the other.\n\nApplication of such insights to Hong Kong's Fujianese helps us to evade the myopia that Fox (1977: 12) and others have recognized in all too many urban \"community\" studies. Viewing the city as a whole we are thus free to conceptualize the Fujianese community of Hong Kong as a somewhat dispersed entity - stretching from parts of North Point, to parts of other neighborhoods, and to the offices of the Fujian Commercial Association in Sheung Wan. Little Fujian as a local community is thus just one part of the larger Fujianese community of Hong Kong and cannot be understood without reference to it, just as village life cannot be fully grasped without a wider social perspective.\n\nSimilar insights into the Shanghaiese community yield quite a different reading of the Shanghaiese status quo. Their ethnic sub-neighborhood, Little Shanghai, is gone, with only pale reminders of its once thriving communality dotting North Point's urban landscape. Yet a Shanghaiese community definitely persists in Hong Kong as both formal organizations and informal sociocultural patterns help maintain a level of interactional intensity sufficient for a \"sense of ethnic community.\" Of course the study of such a community presents far greater methodological and analytical difficulties than are usually encountered in most urban studies. Communities based in clearly recognized and spatially distinct ethnic (sub-) neighborhoods are far easier to deal with; it is no wonder urban anthropologists have preferred to map out such discrete and concentrated domains.\n\nSuch urban studies have been likewise drawn to communities with well-organized and formal social structures. These studies (Charsely 1974; Drieger and Church 1974; McBeath 1973; Neville 1975) have stressed the importance of formally organized institutions in giving that \"sense of ethnic community\" to otherwise anomic and isolated ethnics. Drieger and Church even go so far as to suggest (1974:36) that whenever an ethnic group's proportion of the population approaches 25% there is a corresponding tendency",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n",
        "rank": 0
    }
]