REVIEW
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community and it was found necessary, after much heart- searching, to impose immigration restrictions on entry from China. When the Japanese attack on Hong Kong came in 1941 the Colony was desperately (or so it seemed at the time) overcrowded, and this was one of the factors which impeded its effective defence. The Japanese inherited the same prob- lem but resorted to more drastic measures. In 1942 and 1943 up to 1,000,000 people were expelled, many of them immigrants of a few years earlier, to find such livelihood as they could in the villages and fields of South China.
With the British reoccupation, many returned. The old immigration restrictions were not enforced as far as Chinese travellers from the mainland were concerned, and many thousands of people, impelled by the chaotic con- ditions in China at the time, flooded into Hong Kong seeking, in the main, better opportunities and economic security. Hong Kong began to accept the implications of a population some 25% greater than what might be re- garded as its normal capacity. But worse was to come. By the end of 1949 China's new civil war had spread to the Southern provinces. This and the rapid consolidation of the new régime resulted in a fresh influx, greater than Hong Kong had ever known. This time they were mainly political refugees. By May 1950 there was an increase in population of some 700,000 from this cause alone and in addition to the 'economic' increase between the end of the Pacific War and the capture of Canton by the Communists. Restrictions on entry from China were inevitable. On this occasion a quota system was applied and a rough balance was struck between those entering and leaving the Colony at the border. By February 1956 it was thought that the position might have stabilized itself in the sense either that no more Chinese wished to enter the Colony permanently or that new im- migrants would be naturally balanced by those who, having sheltered in the Colony since the closing stages of the civil war, were now prepared to return to China. All restrictions