ENG-1961 — Page 32

REVIEW

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age in the Colony has work, but many on the fringe of unemploy- ment take whatever work is going from day to day and would have difficulty in answering such a question as 'what do you do for a living?' On the other hand 'what did you do for a living yesterday?' seemed rather too ephemeral, and it was eventually decided to make the question refer to the period (three weeks) between Chinese New Year's Day and census day, since those in regular employment change jobs, if at all, at New Year. As only one occupation could be recorded, anyone who reported two or more occupations was asked 'which did you spend most time on?' If the times were equal, then 'which brought you in the most pay or profit?' And finally if those were equal too, 'which did you do last?'

This approach was not thought necessary for the fishermen and other boat people, nor for the farmers. Hong Kong's farmers are usually not hired workers but farm their own or their family's land, and their unit of time is a year or a whole season from seed-time to harvest. The boat people likewise do not lightly abandon their boats. The farmers and fishermen were therefore asked a further set of questions to record their principal and alter- nate crop or means of fishing, and for the farmers the important question of land tenure. By the end of the year the results of this part of the census had not been tabulated, but when they are it will be interesting to see whether they confirm the impression from casual observation that tenant farming is confined to places acces- sible by road and the neighbourhood of towns, and that the rice and pig farmer is typically an owner while the vegetable and poultry farmer is typically a tenant.

It was, unhappily, not possible to devise a code to record in addition to all this any subsidiary occupation in the farmer's house- hold; unhappily, for it is common knowledge that in the slack farming periods after harvest many farmers' wives and daughters take in industrial out-work, making match boxes for the match factories or sewing buttons onto knitted garments. As the census took place in one of these slack periods several of these side-lines were actually recorded as the main occupation, and the number of farmers recorded as such in the census (43,000) must be cor- respondingly less than the figure that would have been recorded at harvest time.