REVIEW OF THE YEAR
who moved into the colony in the years succeeding the war, when both housing accommodation and building materials were difficult if not impossible to obtain, and while the administration of Government was in process of being re-organized, or who were driven out of China by the southward advance of the communists. On the steep mountain sides which surround Victoria and Kowloon land suitable for building is difficult to find, but these displaced persons in hundreds of thousands settled on the hillsides and in the valleys, building for themselves wooden shacks literally touching each other for hundreds of yards and separated by lanes which are often no more than a yard wide. Fire and health risks are consequently serious, and the difficulties of re-settle- ment are enhanced by the fact that there is no other suitable land and that some congestion is in consequence inevitable.
A measure of the problem is the estimated rise in population, from about one and a half million people in 1941, when conditions were even then too crowded, through a nadir of not much more than half a million in 1945, to some two and a quarter million today. The situation in China has so changed within the last two or three years that the surplus population of these unfortunate people cannot now be expected, as it was previously, to leave Hong Kong, and the situation is being met by a realistic programme of clearing the various squatter areas in turn and re-building on them, and on other reserved areas, buildings of more durable materials laid out so as to minimize the worst risks of fire and disease. The extent of this problem, for a colony the size of Hong Kong, is however enormous and a speedy and at the same time satisfactory solution
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