ABSTRACT
The following paragraphs are offered with considerable diffidence. The fieldwork upon which this paper is based was directed primarily towards the analysis of a socio-economic system as such. 1 As a result, the data on child development and adult attitudes which appear in my notebooks do so almost by accident. They were certainly not collected systematically with the object of testing the validity of hypotheses in social psychology. They did, however, appear to me to have some intrinsic interest at the time, and my thinking about some of the major puzzles in Chinese social patterns – in particular, the marvellous ability of Chinese to ‘live in crowds and keep their virtue’ – has been partly influenced by them. An unpublished version of this paper has already provoked some useful rethinking, and it is my hope that if a wider audience may be reached others may be moved to look further and more scientifically into these and similar matters. The ensuing observations are therefore offered simply as speculations for discussion. I should add that they apply strictly to one particular fishing village in the British crown colony of Hong Kong, but I believe that such truth as they may contain has a much wider validity for Chinese families in general.
