[
    {
        "id": 212083,
        "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-1990",
        "page_number": 25,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "\"Every Chinese peasant is three thousand years of China in miniature. He may not peruse the books of history, but he has heard the story-teller night after night relate in detail, and with delightful embellishments, stories of the history of China from the time of the early rulers to the present day. He and his wife and children have attended the theatricals where the stories of romance, of adventure, of loyalty, and of virtue have been realistically visualised in the open-air theatre that adorns the square of every self-respecting market town. Their culture thought-patterns are not chosen from present day movie stars but from great men of old. The common people have absorbed, not read, from the master spirits of forty centuries.\"\n\n\"Most Chinese peasants are anything but stupid. Their knowledge of their own folklore and folk history is extensive, although it is far from being historically accurate. Usually the history the country person knows has been learned at the opera, and he is frequently unable to say whether a certain character is a real person who lived at a definite time, or merely the creation of a dramatist. This confusion is the more frequent because so many of the characters of Chinese drama are patterned after actual people of history.\"\n\nI do not wish to suggest for a moment that time has ever stood still. Rather, I am using the impressions gained by Joliffe, Winfield and others to emphasise the immense weight and influence of Chinese traditional education and upbringing upon the people until recent times. With reference to Hong Kong, I would say that their powerful, lingering vestiges here lasted until perhaps two decades ago: until the rapid modernisation and the improvements to the educational and socio-economic structure which began in the 1970s soon shifted the whole basis of society onto a more material level, and together with other changes greatly reduced the influence of the past upon behaviour and outlook.\n\nMy own realisation of the continuing strength of traditional values and practice and their lingering influence upon the people was obtained before these changes had taken hold, and was mainly acquired at first hand in the course of observing and experiencing the responses of the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212103,
        "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-1990",
        "page_number": 45,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "22\n\n\"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”.\n\n43\n\nEven 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.\n\nThere 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:\n\n“continued to be supernumeraries as they had been throughout Chinese history, the anonymous human dough that suffered and submitted, the governed...\" \n\n44\n\nresigned 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.\n\nNOTES\n\nR.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.\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]