CY ́D IN
VN51
16 JUL 1969
LAKK1/13 інк
CONFIDENTIAL
K,221
on
file. ANG
K, 221 PA. a winter or braging
вчерна
167.69
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Notes for Mr. J. C. Morgan's Address to Naval Staff Officers
tending the Naval Staff College. Greenwich, on
10 September, 1969.
Hong Kong
General
Although the total land area of the Colony of Hong Kong is no more than 400 square miles, the Colony is by far the largest, in terms of economic activity and population, of our remaining dependent territories. The total population amounts to some four million people of whom 98% are Chinese in origin. It is one of the most densely populated areas in the world with an average density of 10,000 per square mile rising to a peak of 5,000 per acre in certain urban areas. Since 1950 there has been a varying influx of refugees and others from Communist China which rome to a peak in 1962. As a result, about one- third of the Colony's present population now consists of these refugees and their children. This large addition to the population has presented the Hong Kong Government with numerous problems in providing the necessary medical, health, educational, housing and other social amenities. These needs have been met with great efficiency, particularly in the sphere of housing and resettlement, and the Hong Kong Government is now the landlord of approximately one-quarter of the Colony's entire population. Even so, there are still some half a million people awaiting resettlement and re-housing and this figure represents little improvement on the situation obtaining fifteen years ago.
2. Hong Kong suffers from the major and fundamental problem of being a minute enclave on the Chinese mainland. The Hong Kong Government therefore constantly has to bear in mind the susceptibility of its infinitely more powerful Chinese neighbour while at the same time making it clear to the world at large that it is master in its own house and has no intention of being reduced to a Communist cypher as has happened in the case of its
near