6
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
were relaxed for a trial period of seven months. There was, however, no stability. The seven months showed an adverse balance of at least 56,000 permanent immigrants—a rate of immigration well in excess of the Colony's high natural increase. The quota system was, therefore, reimposed early in September 1956.
When one sees a child, or even a dog, run over by a motorcar one hurries to help and the emotions of horror and pity do not die easily. But when one reads of one million homeless exiles all human compassion baulks and the great sum of human tragedy becomes a matter of statistical examination. Personal charity is largely
largely unavailing, vast schemes of national relief are a temporary palliative. Even- tually the last vestiges of hope are centred on the calculating machine and the drawing board. For the last ten years Hong Kong has lived with just such a problem as this. Relief, then jobs, and then homes, for perhaps as many in all as a million people who were not here when the British rule was re-established.
The reader may well ask why this was allowed to happen. A small integrated community with resources appropriate to its size surely has a right to protection against an inunda- tion of strangers. This is an internationally accepted prin- ciple, and Hong Kong's own pre-war and more recent history has shown that it can and must be applied when the situation becomes threatening-or (the cynical reader may add) when the Government wakes up to its responsibilities to its established citizens. Why was the situation ever allowed to develop into the vast problem that now faces the Govern- ment? Was it assumed that up to one million immigrants could be assimilated to an acceptable degree and in reason- able time?
The answer to these questions may fall oddly on modern ears. The immigrants were admitted on humanitarian grounds alone and the problems to which they would give rise if they did not return or emigrate elsewhere were deliberately