[ { "id": 205588, "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": 130, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "CAPITALISM AND THE CHINESE PEASANT\n\n125\n\nA corollary of the sudden rise in land values is of course a desire on the part of landlords or land manipulators to let or sell their land to the highest bidder. Tenant farmers were traditionally protected by an acknowledged system of secure tenancy, but the sanctions which supported this, though effective enough in the past, are rapidly being weakened now, and tenants' title to the land they farm is becoming increasingly insecure. They are seeking legal, documented contracts to protect their interests against those of the landlords.\n\nRents were traditionally high; Potter's conclusion is that rent generally amounted to 45% of the crop—and it is clearly only because the system of reckoning rent, based on the potential rice yield of the land rented, has been slow to catch up with modern conditions that vegetable-growers are not paying much more than they are for their fields. As it is, Potter observed a tendency for rents to rise each time a new tenancy is arranged.\n\nIn spite of increasing insecurity of tenure, and gradually rising rents, farmers' income has risen with the growth of Hong Kong: Potter, with unquestionable logic, derives the one from the other. But he does not explore the paradox that while the bulk of Hong Kong's development has taken place in the context of laissez-faire capitalism, two factors which have been of crucial benefit to the agricultural community have been the result of direct Government intervention: the Vegetable Marketing Organization (V.M.O.) and the Farmers' Cooperative. The paradox deserves consideration—the more so as Potter himself says that the farmers' reaction to the establishment of the Cooperative \"might offer some hint as to the attitude of the peasantry on mainland China to the collectivization of agriculture\". Despite farmers' criticisms, Potter's objective assessment is that both the V.M.O. and the Cooperative have been successful and of great value to the farmers. But how then is one to characterise the economic history of the New Territories since 1900? To this question Potter does not fully address himself, and he allows his section on the Cooperative to belie the implication of his title.\n\nIn spite of the change of title, the argument of the book on the subject of the Treaty Ports is a considerable modification of the argument as presented in the thesis. This is all to the good; the micro-economist takes on the macro-economists at his peril.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206554, "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-1972", "page_number": 102, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "96\n\nE. G. PRYOR\n\nor family. The night soil coolies used to commence work at 1 a.m. in the Chinese quarters of the city, and each was equipped with a pair of buckets suspended from a bamboo pole. The pots were brought into the street and emptied into one of the buckets and then rinsed with water from a third bucket. The first rinsings were added to the night soil and the second rinsings were put back into the water bucket. When full, the buckets were taken to a junk. Fortunately, police regulations required the buckets to have covers.\n\nAs for the disposal of waste kitchen water, all that was provided was a rough earthenware pipe coated with plaster which delivered contents from the upper floors onto the floor of the cookhouse below. Commonly, drains ran from cookhouse to cookhouse under the party walls of adjoining tenements until they reached a public sewer. In some instances, drains traversed several lots under separate ownership, and in cases where there were no rights-of-way the rebuilding of one property in the row sometimes deprived other premises of an outlet. The upstairs residents had no means of disposing of rubbish other than by throwing it out the window or stuffing it into the downpipe from the kitchen; when this happened, the pipe became choked causing it to overflow and saturate the walls with filthy effluent.\n\nThe streets of the city were made of decomposed granite and this was rapidly formed into deep gulleys by torrential summer rains. Little thought was given to ensuring the reservation of adequate street widths, and in some cases the public right-of-way were so narrow that the bamboo poles used to hang out washing reached from side to side. The \"system\" of storm water drains was just as chaotic as the street network and drains were also inappropriately used as sewers which emptied directly into the sea. With few exceptions no attempt was made to carry out the effluent below low water mark, nor to select positions for outfalls where a strong tidal stream would carry it away. Consequently, there was an offensive smell at low tide along the whole waterfront. Worse still, none of the public drains had vents, so that uprising sewer gas had no means of escape except through untrapped house drains and gulley holes at the top end of the sewers.\n\nWater supplies in the dry season amounted to not more than 6 gallons per head per day, which was barely sufficient for cooking and drinking. Chadwick noted that \"to economise water, the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206659, "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-1972", "page_number": 207, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n201 \n\nA NOTE ON AGRICULTURAL CHANGE IN HONG KONG. \n\nIt is trivial to point out to those who are somewhat acquainted with the situation of Hong Kong that the British Crown Colony is in the midst of an intense process of change, embracing most if not all of the sectors of the society. This does not apply only to the city areas on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula, where the postwar explosion of industrialization has left an easily observable impact on the urban landscape and on the people who have congregated there. Even the New Territories—some 360 square miles of open country—have been involved in the spectacular process of change, and not even the most remote villages have remained unaffected by the larger society's striving for new economic achievement. Thus it is not only a question of certain minor industries moving away from the costly land in the industrially and commercially developed areas along the Hong Kong harbour to find new locations in the New Territories. Social life has changed there.\n\nA feature of change, which is easily observable in the New Territories, is a common switch-over from the cultivation of rice to horticulture and floriculture. This replacement of one agricultural system for another has been hinted at repeatedly in the literature on the New Territories. However, these remarks have hardly been accompanied by a penetrating analysis of this phase of change. Therefore, in this short paper, it is my intention to engage in a brief discussion on the economic-agricultural transition which has taken place in the Sha Tin valley in the New Territories where I conducted fieldwork in two stages between 1967 and 1969. I shall argue from the baseline of the social anthropologist rather than that of the rural economist. My focus of interest will be on social forms which could be seen as resultants of processes involving economics.\n\nIt goes without saying that vegetable growing is no recent innovation, neither in the Sha Tin Valley nor in other areas of the New Territories. Higher level land on the sloping mountain sides has always been used for the cultivation of certain vegetables. Evidence at hand seems to indicate that these vegetables were planted entirely for local consumption. Today this is definitely so in many mountain villages in the area. It is clear also that this production of lesser importance occupied land of no vital interest. Rather, horticulture gave subsidiary crops only. The primary land was the irrigated rice land, and to this, villagers allocated most of their interest and their work. The present-day situation is very different, and the Sha", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206679, "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-1972", "page_number": 227, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS \n\nJ \n\n221 \n\nfor prediction purposes without regard to the average age of the average mouth that is to eat all these foodstuffs, but the basic reason, I believe, lies in the methodology adopted in this study. Economists' faith in sophisticated forecasting methods such as those employed here which seek out underlying relationships with the guidance of economic theory and the use of econometric techniques - rests on the ability to determine what these relationships are on the basis of past data and on the belief that the explanatory variables (income, population and price in this study) can be forecast with greater accuracy than the variable one is primarily concerned with, in this case the demand for commodities. If either or both of these twin pillars are suspect it may well be that a naive method, such as extrapolation of past trends, is both cheaper in terms of research resources and more accurate. In the present case there would seem to be strong reasons for suspecting the basis of the study. Regarding the econometrics one can fault the specification of demand relationships which yield improbable price elasticities already discussed; the absence of any tests of and methods of dealing with the serial correlation likely to occur in time series analysis; the absence of coefficients of determination which would indicate the explanatory power of the demand equations; and the use of an explanatory variable which is itself a speculative 'guesstimate' of per capita income and certain to give rise to biased estimates of per capita income coefficients of the errors-in-the-variables type.\n\nAs for the assumption that the explanatory variables per capita income and population — can be predicted with greater accuracy than the demand for commodities, one must admire the authors' optimism. Hong Kong's demographers greatly overestimated the 1966 population through a failure to take into account age-specific birth rates. Even granted the improved professionalism in this area over the last five years it remains true that changes in age of marriage and recourse to birth control can throw out demographic projections. Per capita income projections are far shakier since we do not even know what the trend to date has been with much certainty. Faced with these data problems the authors might well have opted for a naive forecast on the basis that things will stay as they are, only becoming more so! Future requirements of the various commodities could have been predicted on the basis of past values alone, using some function which is found to fit past data best. Such a method would not tell us anything about the underlying forces working", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207496, "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-1975", "page_number": 264, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "256\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nOn 4 August Mr. Zindel carried out a Red Cross inspection of the hospital together with Colonel Tokunaga and his staff, the whole lasting only about twenty minutes and I had no conversation with him. At this time we had been receiving small quantities of fresh meat at weekends and this had gone on for a few weeks before meat was replaced by salted fish, the first fish we had had for a long time. In early August the weather was remarkably cool, dull and showery with the wind varying from S.W. to N.E. The barbed wire was now being brought closer to the hospital and excluded the playing field. We had two dangerously ill patients on 7 August and we received a drum of diesel oil from Saito via our engineers.\n\nMr. Sims was able to repair a burned out high tension cable on our X-ray set and I noted that we put an extra lock on the linen store, a further indication that active trading was still going on. The last Red Cross supplies we had received came in on 29 June and we were running short. Our wheat stock was exhausted and we stopped cooking buns but continued to produce a so-called cake each week and bread made from rice and beans was issued every second day. The Japanese issue of cigarettes for workers which had been due on 20 July arrived on 8 August and Saito told me that wood for fuel was very difficult to get and asked me to economise. We had made two attempts without success to make a wood saw from iron bedsteads. We had now a working party wiring and installing a water supply and a lavatory in the school sports pavilion for the use of the Japanese. We were given 186 small towels, enough for one to each person in hospital and the remainder were raffled. By now the hospital was tired of the lack of news, but remained fairly cheerful except for the blight of three patients on the dangerously ill list. On 15 August one British patient died, thus making the fifth death which had occurred in the Central British School. On 16 August we had a funeral, and a young bull was sighted in the hospital compound but just escaped us. On the same day my diary contains a note to the effect that the war was over, news which reached us via the guards. It is rather remarkable that the official surrender had been made only the previous day in Tokyo. I tackled Saito directly, asking for news but he replied that he had none, though he did promise to tell me as soon as any was available. Next day I asked Saito again in the morning for news and was answered very brusquely that he did not understand my question.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207886, "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": 274, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963 259\n\n*\n\n+\n\ntinues to break up and industrialisation increases, marriage will move more and more into a 'modern' form.\n\nThere is little need to multiply points. A general study of family and marriage ought to be made; it should try to encompass as many different social settings as possible and trace out the changes which are to be expected in the control of children, the support of the aged, polygamy, accumulation of capital within the family, household budgeting, and so on. The study will call for both intensive enquiries and observations and extensive surveys (especially in respect of such matters as family structure and domestic economics).\n\n99. I write as an anthropologist. This fact broadly limits the kinds of problem I have chosen to discuss as well as the methods of research I have so far taken into account. I should like partly to redress the balance by making it clear that I think that other kinds of social scientists ought also to be at work in the New Territories: sociologists, economists, and social geographers, at the very least. (I should have included demographers in this list had it not been that since his completion of the work on the 1961 Census Mr. Barnett has continued to interest himself in statistical questions and that further official studies of population seem likely). Some large-scale enquiries, involving careful sampling and the construction of complex questionnaires—for example, in the fields of education, social mobility, and housing—are necessary; these are matters which must rely on the techniques with which the sociologist is equipped. The field economist (as distinct from the man whose raw data are somebody else's statistics and facts) would be desirable in the study of those economic questions which, because they call for skill in handling technical matters (as in the investigation of business and complex financial affairs) may be too difficult for the all-round social scientist—which is what most anthropologists aim to be. The case for the social geographer is very easy to make: whether in agriculture or industry, the use of land and the relations of society to it are crucial subjects.\n\nBut these are my (summary) views, and sociologists, economists, and geographers must of course be left to speak for themselves.\n\n+\n\n+\n\n+\n\n100. I come now to what I may call a plea rather than a recommendation. It involves taking a point of view which may be quite at variance with the spirit of the times in the New Territories. They and their inhabitants are so busy moving into a new era that the monuments of their past have little meaning for them. Documents", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208375, "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-1978", "page_number": 99, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "THE POLITICIZATION OF CHINESE CRAFT ORGANIZATION IN POST WORLD WAR II HONG KONG\n\nEUGENE COOPER*\n\nIn a private communication to John Stewart Burgess, to which Burgess refers in his 1928 work, The Guilds of Peking, the well-known Chinese economist, Ch'en Ta takes note of three characteristics of the modern industries of the time:\n\n1. that modern industries often came into existence by a process of amalgamation of previously distinct, independent crafts.\n\n2. that this synthetic structure often made it difficult to achieve unity between the various constituent craftsmen in a given industry in pressing for their demands as a unified working class (Burgess, 1928:223).\n\n3. that it was often difficult to overcome provincial feeling in organizing workers from different native places into a unified working class (Ibid:227).\n\nThe process of amalgamation of independent crafts into a single industry is one which Marx noted as characteristic of the early stages of European capitalist development from the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century. This process resulted in a mode of production that Marx called “manufacture”, the archetypal example of which was carriage-making in which the wheelwright, carpenter, upholsterer, and blacksmith came together in a single enterprise to produce carriages, each coming to specialize in the production of carriage parts (Marx, 1967:1:336 ff.).\n\nManufacture arose as a mode of production in the Chinese art-carved furniture industry in the 1920's, as the result of just such a process of amalgamation which brought rural temple carvers together under the same roof with carpenters and painters in what became urban Shanghai and Canton-based carved furniture factories.\n\n* Dr. Cooper is Lecturer in Sociology in the University of Hong Kong. This article first appeared as a paper read to the Symposium on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the Politicization of Asian Folk Culture, held at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting in New York City, March 25, 1977.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210984, "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-1987", "page_number": 46, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "21\n\nnineteenth-century sinologists had laid the foundations for modern China in studies in the West.\n\nBut this long episode of almost total neglect of China was to come to an end with the unexpected ascendancy of Communist China. French intellectuals were caught completely unprepared, all the more since there was strictly no equivalent in France to the sympathetic writings of Snow, Smedley and so many other reporters who had prepared at least some sections of British and American public opinion for the Communist takeover. The French intellectual scene was a blank page - a very Maoist feature and this was a decisive contributing factor to what has since been described as the 'love affair' between Maoist China and French intellectuals.\n\nThis love affair is a very complex story, and requires a much closer look. It had first of all to do with the rejection on the part of the French intellectuals of Soviet-styled communism, once so popular with them. China and Maoism provided ex-Communist Party members with an occasion to settle their accounts with Moscow. Chinese communism was also considered a valuable experiment in Marxist economic theory, and noted economists, such as Charles Bettelheim, always made this point. For Jean-Paul Sartre, who was in the late 1960s at the peak of his cultural and political prestige, Peking was definitely different from Moscow.\n\nChina also met a basic aspiration among French left-wing intellectuals, which I would describe as political exoticism, that is, the tendency to look for a political homeland and model of reference in distant, exotic countries. At times in Cuba, at one time in Algeria, in Vietnam, then in China; each provided a substitute for the ideal society France was unable to develop at home, especially after the failure of the May '68 movement which had been so popular with most intellectuals, and not only with students. The radical young intellectuals of the May '68 generation, such as André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, who were later to establish themselves as trendy 'new philosophers', were among the most devoted Maoists.\n\n—\n\nBut it would be just too easy to restrict the love affair between Maoism and French intellectuals to such radical groups. At least", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212178, "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": 120, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "97\n\nmade a very good shewing, which drew the admiration of all neutral observers. The Japanese soon brought reinforcements and extended their front down towards the Yangtze in an attempt to dislodge the Chinese from their grip on the suburb of Chapei; but despite the overwhelming superiority of the Japanese equipment, especially in the air, the Chinese stuck to their ground all through August and September, until well into October, when they began to crack, and were finally dislodged by a successful landing on the flank in Hangchow Bay,\n\nThese operations at first led to a complete breakdown in communications between Nanking and Shanghai. Towards the end of August, however, it was found that cars could cover the 200 miles to Shanghai by turning off the main road at Soochow, and passing through Kashing to the Hangchow road, which entered Shanghai from the south. As I was badly in need of instructions I decided to motor down. On arrival in Shanghai I was astonished at the state in which I found popular foreign opinion. There appeared to be no adequate appreciation of the meaning of these new Japanese encroachments in China, or of the Japanese threat to the \"open door\" system of trading the Far East, the traditional British policy expressed in Lord Palmerston's instructions to Admiral Elliot in 1840, when he said \"You will bear in mind that Her Majesty's Government do not desire to obtain for British subjects any exclusive privileges of trade which should not be equally extended to the subjects of every other power\".\n\nShanghai had for some years been the object of much factious interference and petty vexation on the part of Chinese officials in their campaign to recover their \"lost privileges\". The municipal council of the International Settlement found itself continuously involved in arguments, mostly sterile, over all sorts of questions of local interest, such as roads, police, taxes, jurisdiction, and so on, providing occasions where the Chinese aptitude for obstruction had full play. The consequence was to alienate the sympathies of many of the leading foreigners in the main stronghold of foreign interests in China. (According to Professor Remer, an American economist who made a study of foreign investments in China in 1931, British business investments were distributed as follows:\n\nIn Shanghai £130,000,000\n\nIn Hongkong £36,000,000\n\nIn the rest of China £30,000,000\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212323, "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": 265, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "242\n\nChartered Bank\n\nUntil 1840 or so banking facilities in Hong Kong were provided by the large hongs, such as Jardine's, Dent's and Russell's. However, once the Colony was considered stable enough, bankers came here following the traders, and, after the establishment of the Treaty Port System, starting in 1843, a number of joint-stock banks with their headquarters in India or London opened. The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, one of the principal promoters of which was James Wilson MP, the founder of The Economist, and a successful businessman, was such a bank. It was established in London in 1853, and its first branches in the East were founded in Calcutta and Shanghai, both in 1858. Only six years after receiving its Royal Charter Makalee (F), as the bank is called in China (a direct translation of John MacKellar, the first manager in Shanghai), set up a branch in 1859 in Hong Kong.\n\nSince 1862, Jah Da (†) (as 'Chartered' is usually called in Cantonese in Hong Kong) has issued its own bank notes. It is at present the oldest foreign bank and was the first licensed financial institution in the Colony. Together with the Hong Kong Bank, the Bank of East Asia, and the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation, the 'Textile Bank' (yet another sobriquet for 'Chartered' because of its connections with that industry) was one of four overseas banks that was allowed to keep its branch in Shanghai after the People's Republic Government came to power in 1949.\n\nThe author recalls opening his first account with the Chartered Bank in early January 1955, not in the building that was demolished in 1986 (which was completed in 1959 and at the time was the tallest building in Hong Kong) but in the one before that. There was a colonial atmosphere about the place, with paddle-type fans suspended from ceilings. Few buildings in Hong Kong were air-conditioned then. The bank did not open its first branch in the Territory until early 1962. This was in Tsuen Wan.\n\nA time-worn adage had it, a little unkindly perhaps, that officers of Chartered were bankers aiming to be gentlemen, and that expatriates in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank were gentlemen trying to be bankers. In those days the Hong Kong Bank did not employ Chinese, other than in menial positions, and local staff were mainly Eurasians.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212619, "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-1991", "page_number": 173, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "153\n\nEve dinner. We parted the next day as our ways lay in different directions.\n\nAfter completion of the reconnaissance I returned to Shangjao, where General Ku Chu Tung again very kindly accommodated me at his personal headquarters. Michael and I and the Chinese officers attached to us had our own little mess, and General Ku sent his own cook to prepare our meals, a signal courtesy which was much appreciated. Soon after my return I was delighted to hear that the two British Army Liaison Officers, had also escaped from Shanghai, with a third companion. They passed through shortly after on their way to Chungking. On December 7th they had had to go to earth, as the Japanese had raised a hue and cry after them: however, with the assistance of Chinese friends they finally made their way out past the wire. I hope one day the account of their adventures will appear in print,\n\nThe Japanese in Shanghai did not commence to round up Allied civilian foreigners for concentration in camps until the autumn of 1942, and the concentration was not completed until the spring of 1943. The foreigners were permitted to continue in occupation of their houses and to keep servants, though the limited funds released from the banks did not allow of living at the same standards as previously. To economise there was a tendency for households, or messes of bachelors, to amalgamate. Quite a few foreigners lived in houses outside the barbed-wire barrier and for the first few weeks one could pass in and out of the gates on the few roads which led through the barrier by claiming that one lived outside. During this period, Jim, an English missionary who spoke the Shanghai dialect well got out. He was waiting with Mac at Chin Ya when we returned there in March. In the course of time the Japanese brought a system of passes into use, and the issue of special passes to persons wishing to visit friends outside was restricted. Nevertheless, the arrangements were such as to provide plenty of opportunity for those who wished to pass through the barrier. At the worst one could crawl under the wire at night, when the sentries were mostly withdrawn to their main posts. But few young Britons seized the opportunity to escape while they could. In the upshot more Americans got away than British, though American residents only numbered about one third as many as the British, of whom some 5,000 were interned, including of course a considerable proportion of women and children.\n\nA small party of three American journalists escaped at about this time through Hangchow. I did not meet them. The next escape to be reported", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215277, "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": 54, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "2\n\nThere is one exception to these generalisations, a deviant case which has never been analysed by the economists who deplore the underdevelopment of the colonial empire. The amazing economic growth of Hong Kong since its liberation from the Japanese occupation in 1945 is well known, but it is widely assumed that before the war the Hong Kong economy was almost entirely based upon the entrepôt trade transporting goods to and from China and that its transformation from a trading mart to a manufacturing centre began with the post-war arrival of industrialists from Shanghai fleeing from the chaos of China's civil war. In fact, the development of industry had begun in the nineteenth century and by 1939 Hong Kong had built up a flourishing export trade in manufactured goods to China and neighbouring Asian countries and was even successfully competing with British firms in a few items in the British home market.\n\nThe growth of Hong Kong industry was accelerated in the 1930s by decisions taken at the Imperial Economic Conference which met at Ottawa in August 1932. The conference was called to find ways of combating the worldwide economic depression by stimulating trade between the countries of the empire after the British government had decided to abandon its long-standing commitment to free trade and to impose a ten per cent tariff on foreign imports. The conference was mainly occupied with bargaining between Britain and the dominions over the terms on which agricultural products from the dominions would enter the British market and the access of British manufactured goods to the dominions.\n\nThe ministers meeting at Ottawa also decided to impose stringent restrictions by tariffs and specific duties on imports of textiles and other goods from Japan which were beginning to penetrate empire markets, displacing British and Canadian manufactures. Chinese businessmen in Hong Kong took advantage of this attempt to exclude Japanese goods from dominion and colonial markets to export large quantities of cheap footwear and textiles to the empire. This provoked indignant complaints from industrialists in Britain and Canada who demanded that restrictions should be placed on the supercompetitive Hong Kong manufactures.\n\nHong Kong's successful penetration of empire markets forced the British government for the first time to consider what its policy should be towards the industrial development of the colonial empire. Two interdepartmental committees of civil servants were set up in 1933 and 1937, but no authoritative decision was reached by the cabinet before the outbreak of war in 1939. Officials at the Colonial Office defended the right of the colonies to diversify their economies by moving into manufacturing, but the Board of Trade and the Treasury were generally unenthusiastic about such schemes where they might result in a reduction of British exports.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215327, "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": 104, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "52\n\n1101. Though well known for his poetry, he was a celebrated scholar-statesman who has been deified by popular acclaim. However, though not recorded as such, it would be unlikely for him not to have been deified by posthumous imperial decree, an honour coming into vogue at that time.\n\nHe was born in Meixian in Sichuan province and died in Changzhou in Fujian shortly after being permitted to leave exile on Hainan island. His father was a distinguished scholar, and owing to his father's long absences from home, Su received most of his education from his mother. At the age of 21, he entered the state examinations and headed the list of competitors. He rose in public office and was prominent among the strenuous opponents of the political economist, Wang Anshi. His first fall from grace in 1079 was from ministerial office when he was downgraded to be Governor of Hangzhou Fu. In 1086, at the start of a new reign, he was restored to favour but again incurred imperial displeasure, this time being exiled, first to Huizhou in Guangdong and finally to the semi-barbarous island of Hainan in 1097 where he was appointed to the petty office of sub-prefect of Yaizhou. During his exile, having complained that Hainan was wild and its \"frontier\" people, settlers from the mainland, without culture, he took a genuine interest in their welfare as well as the welfare of the original non-Chinese inhabitants. He was permitted to return from banishment in ca. 1100 and died shortly after. He spent the four years of his exile in Hainan in Wenchang, in the north-east of the island, and was the first great name in Chinese history connected intimately with Hainan. His memorial temple in Haikou in Hainan island is now a museum. Within the grounds of the temple is the spring which he is said to have had dug during a severe drought.\n\nd] Zhu Chuping was a magistrate in Hainan who had preceded Su Shi in the post as magistrate by some twenty years.\n\n3: Major Hainanese Deities noted in all Hainanese communities\n\nThese are uniquely Hainanese Gods\n\n13\n\na] Images of the Marquis of Wenzhou, Wenzhou Houwang\n\nI have been seen only on altars in temples founded and run by ethnic Hainanese. According to devotees, he is uniquely worshipped", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]