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Influence of South-Seas Emigration on Certain Chinese Provinces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Francis L. K. Hsu
Francis L. K. Hsu
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

The Chinese are changing,” we heard this said many times even before the last war. Numerous books, mainly popular in nature, have been written on this very theme. Most of us often fail to realize that it is largely an assumption. Unlike other assumptions about the Chinese it has, however, rarely been seriously questioned. To what extent have the Chinese changed? What are the most important factors responsible for their change? What are some of the directions of their change? These and other questions have been variously asked, but have usually been given answers so full of generality that few students of science found them useful.

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , November 1945 , pp. 47 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1945

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References

1 F. L. K. Hsu, “The myth of Chinese family size,” Americanjournal of sociology. May, 1943.

2 I have touched upon this matter in a pamphlet: Magic and science in western Yunnan, published by the IPR, New York, 1943.

3 Of the 30 religious holidays and spirits worshipped given on p. 232 of the book, 18 holidays and 14 spirits or gods correspond exactly to those in a West Yunnan town which I investigated and 6 other spirits are found throughout China. Of the ten festivals given on p. 233, 8 are observed practically throughout North China.

3a The text has “non-emigrant,” but this appears to be an error according to the Table and the context.

4 For clothing, rent, fuel and light the picture is not decisive. This question has been thoroughly discussed in works by Ford, Dittmer, Lamson and others.

5 The position is virtually the same in Table 10 when rent is included.

6 In Table 10 this picture is not only unaltered but the percentage given for food by 49 more of emigrant families becomes higher than that by 23 of the non-emigrant families.

7 In this connection there seems to be a discrepancy in the English and Chinese versions of the book. In the author's original work (in Chinese) he calls all these clinics hospitals (Yi Yuan), but specifies that all except one in Area X have no In Patients department. The six clinics in area Z are not called hospitals in Chinese by the author but are called “western pharmacies with clinics for free treatment.” The editor of the book has designated all of them by the term hospital. Generally we regard a clinic as a place for treating out-patients and a hospital as a place for treating out-patients as well as caring for in-patients.

8 For example, in connection with “Health and habits” (Chap. VIII), we note detailed qualification of the medical practitioners in the non-emigrant area but know nothing about those in the emigrant areas. On the other hand, we only know the size of population in the emigrant communities but not that of the non-emigrant community (pp. 180–184). In connection with education, we know the number of schools in the emigrant areas but no exact figure concerning the non-emigrant area (except a vague reference on (p. 168). Similarly, w e have some data on religious beliefs in the two emigrant communities but no comparable data in the non-emigrant households of the same province. On the other side, there are plenty of quotations from district and prefecture gazetteers such as the following: “Peasant women wear straw slippers and carry burdens…. The gentlemen are seldom quick-witted. The humble people are frugal and sustain life by their own efforts” (p. 30), etc. etc. We have to question the wisdom of resorting to prefecture and district gazetteers as a guide to the “Culture traits of the people.”