[
    {
        "id": 205582,
        "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-1968",
        "page_number": 124,
        "title": "RAS-1968",
        "content_text": "119\n\nCAPITALISM AND THE CHINESE PEASANT; SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN A CHINESE VILLAGE* \n\nReviewed by H. G. H. NELSON† \n\nJack Potter lived in Hang Mei, one of the eight villages making up the Tang stronghold of Ping Shan, from the autumn of 1961 to the beginning of 1963. His findings were first reported in his Ph.D. Thesis for the University of California, and apart from one or two minor, though not unimportant, textual changes, the bulk of the thesis is here presented verbatim. It has been changed in only one major respect: a short section on the effects of the Western Treaty Ports on the surrounding rural hinterland has been expanded into the essay which forms the book's concluding chapter; the title has also been changed from Ping Shan: the Changing Economy of a Chinese Village,\n\nThe book's stated purposes are, first, to explore the reasons why the villagers of Ping Shan have prospered by their participation in the general commercial and industrial expansion of Hong Kong; second, to study the process of \"depeasantization” and the penetration of the external market into the hitherto largely self-contained economy of the peasant; and third, to make a contribution to the understanding of the effects on China's rural economy of the Treaty Ports. A further tacit purpose of the book is the validation of some of the theories put forward by Freedman (1958) in Lineage Organization in Southeastern China—and it is one that is particularly well-served.\n\nPotter divides his field-data into three main sections:\n\n1) the occupational structure of Ping Shan in the early 1960s, and the process by which some of the villagers have made the transition \"from peasants to farmers\".\n\nCapitalism and the Chinese Peasant; Social and Economic Change in a Chinese Village: Jack M. Potter, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968; pp. ix, 215, illustrated, US$5.75.\n\n† Mr. Howard Nelson is a graduate student of the University of London at present engaged on social research in the New Territories.\n\nPing Shan is in the north-west New Territories of Hong Kong. For Ping Shan with Ha Tsuen see pp. 162-165 of A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong, Government Printer, n.d. but 1960). Ed.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205813,
        "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-1969",
        "page_number": 119,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "113\n\nTHE CHINESE DESCENT SYSTEM AND THE OCCUPANCY LEVEL OF VILLAGE HOUSES\n\nH. G. H. NELSON*\n\nDr. Göran Aijmer, in an article in the last issue of this Journal, touches on the problem of the occupancy level of Chinese village houses at the time when the British took over the New Territories. Discussing the relative wealth of two neighbouring communities in 1905, he assumes (footnote 10) that \"at one time all house-units were inhabited by one household each ....”, and expresses surprise that his calculations reveal an average of only 1.7 and 2.2 persons per house instead of the five or so that he would have expected (footnote 7). He suggests that there must have been a drastic reduction in the population to produce such a low level of occupancy. I believe, however, that his figures reveal a perfectly normal situation, which does not need to be explained in terms of large-scale out-migration. The purpose of this article is to point out certain features of Chinese social structure, and of the physical nature of New Territories villages, which make inevitable such low ratios of people to houses.\n\nAt the same time, Aijmer has indirectly raised the much more fundamental issue of the relation between the kinship structure of the Chinese and their domestic architecture. I shall touch briefly on the problem of understanding what is meant by the term 'village house' in the context of Hong Kong, and hope to give further consideration elsewhere to the light thrown on the Chinese understanding of family development by the way they build and distribute their house-property. It should be pointed out here, however, that the local pattern of building single domestic units in terraced rows finds few, if any, parallels in other parts of China. In Taiwan, for example, the dominant pattern in rural domestic architecture is that of the L or U shaped homestead.\n\nVillage Houses: The Problem of Definition\n\nWhat, then, is a village house? I myself recently came up against the problem of deciding just what is meant by the term\n\n* Mr. Howard Nelson of the London School of Economics was engaged on social research in the New Territories in 1967-68. His review article of Jack Potter's recent book Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant; Social and Economic Change in a Chinese Village (University of California Press, 1968) appeared at pp. 119-127 of last year's Journal.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207068,
        "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-1974",
        "page_number": 139,
        "title": "RAS-1974",
        "content_text": "THE HONG KONG REGION\n\n133\n\nHayes, J. W., 'Old Ways of Life in Kowloon: the Cheung Sha Wan Villages\" in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. VIII, No. 1, January 1970: 154-188.\n\nHo, Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1959.\n\nHsieh, Kuo Ching, 'Removal of Coastal Population in Early Tsing Period', The Chinese Social and Political Science Review, XIII, 1929: 559-596.\n\nHummel, Arthur W. (Editor), Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644-1912), Taipei, Ch'eng Wen Publishing Company, 1967. Reprint of the first edition, Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 2 vols., 1943.\n\nKrone, Rev. Mr., A Notice of the Sanon District. C.B.R.A.S. Transactions VI, 1859: 71-105. Reprinted in JHKBRAS 7, 1967: 104-137.\n\nLo, Hsiang-lin, 'The Sung Wang T'ai and the Location of the Travelling Courts by the Sea-shore in the Last Days of the Sung' in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. III, No. 2, July 1956.\n\n-, (and others), Hong Kong and Its External Communications before 1842. Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Culture, 1963. An English version, abbreviated, of the Chinese edition of 1959.\n\nMayers, W. F., Dennys, N. B. and King, C., The Treaty Ports of China and Japan. A Complete Guide to the Open Ports of these countries, together with Peking, Yedo, Hong Kong and Macao. London, Trübner & Co., Hong Kong, A. Shortrede & Co., 1867.\n\nMurphey, Rhoads, The Treaty Ports and China's Modernization: what went wrong? Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, No. 7, Ann Arbor, 1970.\n\nMontalto de Jesus, C. A., Historic Macao, International Traits in China Old and New. Macao, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, 1926.\n\nNeumann, C. F., Translations from the Chinese and Armenian with Notes: 1 History of the Pirates who infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810, London, John Murray, 1831.\n\nNg, Peter Y. L., The 1819 Edition of the Hsin-an Hsien-chih, A Critical Examination with Translation and Notes. Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (1644-1842). Unpublished M. A. thesis, University of Hong Kong, 1961.\n\nNg, Ronald C. Y., 'The San On Map of Mgr. Volontieri. On the Centenary of the Copy in the R.G.S. Collection', London, Geographical Journal, Vol. 135, Part 2, June, 1969: 231-235. Reprinted in JHKBRAS 9, 1969: 141-148.\n\nOrme, G. N., Report on the New Territories for the Years 1899 to 1912. in Sessional Papers 1912.\n\nPerkins, Dwight H., Agricultural Development in China 1368-1968. Chicago, Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.\n\nPotter, Jack M., Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant, Social and Economic Change in a Hong Kong Village. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1968.\n\nSchofield, Walter, Personal Communications, 1958-1968.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207821,
        "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-1976",
        "page_number": 209,
        "title": "RAS-1976",
        "content_text": "194\n\nMAURICE FREEDMAN\n\nsummer); Miss Jean Pratt from Cambridge, who studied a Hakka village in the neighbourhood of Tai Po; and, most recently, Mr. Jack Potter, from Berkeley, California, who has just completed a study of one of the major Tang settlements in Yuen Long District. All these may be called community studies, for they attempted to give rounded accounts of the lives of the people they investigated. The results of the three studies, when they are fully published, will provide a useful sample of traditional communities in the New Territories, for they cover both fishing and agriculture and range from relatively unsophisticated Tanka, through a small, and in some respects isolated, Hakka settlement, to one of the old centres of Punti power. In addition to these field studies the work of another anthropologist, Dr. Marjorie Topley, has dealt with the New Territories in a general way in regard to aspects of their economic life.\n\n7. The gaps in knowledge and understanding of New Territories society are in part filled by the results of investigations carried out by other kinds of scholars. I have in mind particularly the work done by geographers and historians. The field studies by Dr. T.R. Tregear and Dr. C.J. Grant are too well known to call for my comment. At the moment further geographical field studies are in train; for example, Mr. Ronald Ng, a graduate student at the University of Hong Kong, is engaged in an investigation of the Tung Chung valley which promises to bring in much new material on the social aspects of agriculture. As for history, I may mention the work of Mr. J.W. Hayes, formerly a District Officer in the New Territories; he has produced two studies, one dealing with the New Territories as they were just before British rule, the other on Cheung Chau, which illustrate very happily how the work of the social historian and that of the anthropologist can complement each other.\n\n8. But when the fruits of all this work are put together they will still leave out of account much that is important. The New Territories can no longer be regarded as simply a rural appendage to urban Hong Kong, an area where traditional Chinese village life has, because of the accident arising out of diplomacy in the nineteenth century, been fostered by British administration, a museum conveniently arranged for the benefit of antiquarians. The population has changed to what extent is demonstrated by the admirably conducted and analysed census of 1961. Modern industry has not",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q",
        "rank": 0
    }
]