[
    {
        "id": 205309,
        "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-1967",
        "page_number": 71,
        "title": "RAS-1967",
        "content_text": "64\n\nL. G. AIMER\n\nemigrants who had left the Colony. The masons in Grass Field Village, who had their village within a day's journey, naturally had a word in all village affairs; but the Big Stream men working in Vancouver or on Aruba in the West Indies had a very limited influence on decisions made in the home community.\n\nVI\n\nTraditional leadership in these Hakka villages was gerontocratic in nature. There were no formal isu (M) or fang (M) leaders. An informal council of old men met occasionally in the ancestral hall to discuss current problems. These persons' influence was directly correlated to the distribution of economic control within the community. As long as this differentiation was small, all elders would have had fairly equal status. Age differentiation within the group does not seem to have been of vital importance.\n\nThe process of emigration created new economic groups. In Big Stream Village, where emigration abroad early dominated the scene, the informal council of village elders is made up of four former overseas Chinese. Two of them have worked in the United States, one in Canada, and one on Aruba in the Netherlands West Indies. The last-mentioned man has quite a good house and has apparently had some resources, but he is in poor health, struck by rheumatism, a fact he ascribes to excessive use of alcohol in his younger days. His sight is bad and is hardly improved by the smashed pair of spectacles on his nose. This 76-year-old man said that he was 'willing to accept anything, whatever it is and whenever it comes.' He has no children. His influence on village affairs is apparently very limited. It seems as if he is taking part in the village council meetings merely to represent the first minor lineage, even if I was never able to confirm a strict rule that all fang (M) should be represented there.\n\nOf the other three leaders, two are men who have spent much time in New York in the United States, and one who has been working in Vancouver, Canada. One of the New York men is Village Representative and the official spokesman with the British administrative authorities. He is 73 years old and a",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205321,
        "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-1967",
        "page_number": 83,
        "title": "RAS-1967",
        "content_text": "76\n\nL. G. AIMER\n\nthe carrying and other heavy work, \"The men do not even know how to carry water\" and probably do not demand that the women give them lessons at it.' \n\nFrank 1925, p. 210f. Even among the Cantonese-speaking Punti population in Kwangtung, traditional women's participation in the work in the fields occurred; cf. Yang 1959, p. 21f. The notes above, however, are to be read as contrasts to Punti custom.\n\n35 Investments in house building on a large scale seem to be typical for all Chinese peasant communities with a marked inflow of external income. Generalizing from his experiences with three emigrant communities in Fukien and Kwangtung, Chen Ta writes:\n\n\"The most practical way to gratify their vanity is to build a house. Even when he does not contemplate a return in the immediate future, a Chinese emigrant who has made a fortune in the Nan Yang is quite likely to send a sum of money home for the express purpose of buying a new house\"; Chen 1939, p. 109.\n\nFrom another part of China, Francis Hsu notes that\n\n\"in this Yunnan community people became rich not through South-Seas emigration, but through tin mines and trading. As soon as a family becomes wealthy, it begins to build huge but largely unused houses ...\"; Hsu 1945, p. 48.\n\nBoth authors interpret house building as the symbolic aspect of the move from one social position to another by the sojourner in his home community, the big house being closely associated with gentry status. A comment on increasing house building in the New Territories in the beginning of this century is made in the N. T. Report 1899-1912, p. 56.\n\n36 Although these people have spent many years in English-speaking countries, none of them can converse in the English language. Also, this is largely true for the younger generation now residing in Britain. The Chinese emigrant is often sojourning in a Chinese enclave, the structure of which, in many important respects, is very different from that of his home community; it is still basically Chinese and offers social security in a foreign country. I have the impression that the sojourners have a fairly limited direct contact with the people of the country where they stay, especially if this is in Europe or America. Such contacts are also often highly formalized, of the type client-waiter relations in a restaurant. The surrounding social milieu is, I feel, experienced filtered through the culture of the enclave.\n\n37 In 1963 overseas remittances, in the form of postal and money orders cashed at the New Territories post offices, amounted to the value of HK$20,973,152. The corresponding figure for 1964 was HK$24,076,719; Hong Kong 1963, p. 60; Hong Kong 1964, p. 30. Considerable sums will also have been remitted through banks: these figures are not known. One item of information from the New Territories tells that one farmer annually receives about HK$1,500 from his two sons working in England; Topley 1964, p. 176. Ronald Ng (1965, p. 35) estimates the monthly remittances at £30, or HK$5,760 annually.\n\n38 This means that the daily income for a restaurant worker in Britain would amount to nearly HK$23. This may be compared to the daily wage of a worker in the New Territories which is about HK$10. Ng gives a similar figure for restaurant workers in the U.K.; Ng (1965, p. 35).\n\n39 The situation of the members of the overseas community in Britain could be compared to that of a villager of Big Stream Village working in a grocer's shop on the island of Aruba in the Netherlands West Indies. His salary there is 'over' US$100, i.e., at least HK$130, a month. The daily",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207864,
        "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": 252,
        "title": "RAS-1976",
        "content_text": "(b) that nearly all of them hold British passports and may be assumed to have been born in the Colony, and (c) that they are practically all men of working age, then we may conclude that they represent very roughly, perhaps a third of all the men in the New Territories who were born there and who fall within the economically active years of manhood. Since, furthermore, there are certain areas of the New Territories from which emigration has been especially heavy, despite the fact that men from all areas have participated in the movement, there are grounds for assuming that the effect of migration must in places have been extremely important.\n\n73. The scale and direction of the emigration of the last few years are novel, but they rest on a tradition which reminds us that in this, as in many other respects, the New Territories are geographically and culturally part of southeastern China. For, especially since the middle of the last century, the coastal regions of the provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien have served as a reservoir from which many countries, above all in South-East Asia, have drawn population. Emigration to California and Australia,—the 'gold mountains'—was noted by the first British administrators of the New Territories (for they spoke of loan associations got up to finance men wanting to go to these two countries), but there are hints in the early census reports that New Territories people were scattered more widely. The 1911 census shows a handful of Chinese in the New Territories to have been born in Annam, Hawaii, the Philippines, the Straits Settlements, Siam, and Australia. In 1921 the countries which appear in this context, again with reference to very small numbers, are Annam, India, Japan, British Borneo, France, Italy, the U.S.A., and Mexico. The list for 1931 reads: Indo-China, British North Borneo, Malaya, Netherlands East Indies, Siam, Canada, the U.S.A., Cuba, Panama, Guiana, Peru, England, and Holland. There were, in fact, two kinds of emigrants; landsmen who went overseas to make a living in a particular country, and seamen who, whether legally or not, left their ships to try their luck in places to which they had been carried. The establishment of Hong Kong as a British settlement in 1842 created a demand for local seamen, many of whom were recruited from the Chinese villages lying near the new centre. Men from Lamma Island and from Lantau Island seem at an early date to have taken service in British and other ships.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q",
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    },
    {
        "id": 215280,
        "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-2001",
        "page_number": 57,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "and batteries, canvas and rubber footwear, rattan furniture, trunks, suitcases, umbrellas and rope. Almost all these exports went to China and the nearby states of the Philippines, Netherlands East Indies, Malaya, Siam, French Indo-China, Burma and India. The only significant exports to Britain were 268 tons of lard valued at £7,000 and £50,000 of preserved ginger.\n\nIn the 1930s exports to China were badly affected by a steep rise in import duties. Under the treaties imposed on China in the nineteenth century tariffs were limited to five per cent, but over the period 1926 to 1933 China achieved full tariff autonomy and soon raised its duties to gain additional revenue, and also to protect its own industries and substitute local manufactures for foreign imports. For example, the duty on rubber-soled shoes remained at five per cent until 1931 when it was raised to 17 per cent and then to 30 per cent in 1933. Similar protectionist moves were made by neighbouring countries in an attempt to combat the world depression of the 1930s. The Philippines raised its tariff on rubber shoes from 25 per cent to 100 per cent in 1933. This escalation in tariff barriers affected Hong Kong's trade and economic prosperity in two ways: the entrepôt trade through Hong Kong was reduced since China was deliberately seeking to curtail foreign imports; and Hong Kong's domestic exports of manufactured goods to China were also affected. A number of factories were forced to close having lost their markets in China. The value of imports and exports passing through the harbour dropped by 40 per cent between 1931 and 1934. Hong Kong's economy was saved from ruin by the amazing growth in its exports of manufactured goods to empire markets. This was an unintended consequence of the decisions taken at Ottawa to erect trade barriers to exclude Japanese exports.\n\nPage 17\n\nII\n\nWhen the colonies of European settlement had advanced to internal self-government it was no longer politically possible for Britain to exercise control over their trade and tariff policies. The dominions wished to protect their infant industries against imported manufactures, including imports from Britain. At imperial conferences the dominion premiers offered to grant a preferential rate of duty to British goods and asked that Britain should reciprocate by granting a tariff preference to empire produce over foreign goods. Britain refused this offer and remained committed to free trade. The dominions then acted unilaterally to make Britain a beneficiary of their tariff policies. Canada was the first to grant tariff preferences to Britain in 1897, followed by South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. In 1907 the preferences granted to Britain by Canada were extended to the West Indian colonies, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Ceylon and the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]