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Hong Kong has come from the UK compared with 20-25% from Japan and 50% from the US.
7.
The underlying theme of the whole section is, in keeping with the ideological background of its authors, that Hong Kong is a machine for the exploitation of the workers by British and Chinese capitalists. But the booklet does not explain away the fact that almost half the present population have deliberately chosen to immigrate into Hong Kong, and that immigration, legal and illegal, continues at about 50,000 a year. These immigrants are dismissed as "capitalist Chinese and assorted members of
...
the proletariat, lumpen proletariat and parasitic sectors". 8. Finally, having attacked the colonial Government's subservience to the capitalists, the booklet admits that that Government have in recent years interfered with the laissez-faire economy through a series of large public works projects "some of which are advantageous". Because of the selective dating of the statistics, there is no reference, for example, to the ten year housing plans as part of these public works programme.
9.
The next section on economic and social conditions dismisses the claim that real wages are second only to Japan in the Far East by the journalistic device of saying "It would be difficult to argue that a worker in Hong Kong has a higher standard of living than, for example, a worker in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea". The final two sections on "Hong Kong and Britain" and "The Political Future" repeat the claim that Britain rules Hong Kong for its financial gain and has also used it as "an extremely useful base for assisting in the attack on the Korean people". Finally the booklet attacks the thesis that China is content with the status quo. It argues that the flow of foreign exchange to China is unimportant and could be made up by exports elsewhere (though it admits that these exports have produced up to 40% of China's foreign exchange, and though the people of Hong Kong would still have to eat if they became absorbed in China,— the difference would be that they would not pay for their food in foreign exchange). The authors assert that the argument that this is a factor in Chinese thinking "strains credulity". The booklet's conclusion is that, while China may not wish to take any steps to recover Hong Kong itself, "nothing in China's position
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/indicates