12
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
lar steel. Since 1949, therefore, industry has been Hong Kong's economic salvation. It has also meant salvation for the refugees though it could provide for many of them little more than a bare subsistence.
It is against this background of the general political and economic scene that the more particular problems created by the squatters must be examined. The word 'squatter' is introduced because it is now necessary to find a rather broader term which will include three classes of deprived persons, i.e. immigrants who left China before the Com- munist victory, refugees who left China because of that victory, and the Hong Kong residents who sold out their homes to wealthier immigrants in one or other of the two former classes, and themselves became virtually destitute. The one thing that all classes had in common was the inability to find or to afford conventional accommodation. The squatter settlements contained elements of all three categories though the first and third categories were not nearly so numerous in the settlements as the second. It has been necessary in the course of earlier generalizations to speak as if the settlements gave rise to a single political problem and as if they were filled with people with a com- mon background. Numerically the generalization is justified, but it is of some importance in what follows to appreciate that in fact there were two minority groups in the settlements one of which was composed of people who were not strictly refugees, though they were immigrants, and the other of people who were neither refugees nor immigrants.
For reasons which have already been given, the squatters crowded in upon the two towns, Victoria on the Island of Hong Kong and Kowloon on the mainland peninsula. Their need was so great and so pressing that they had no thought for the ownership of land and it would have required an army of police to have restrained them. Virtually every size- able vacant site which was not under some form of physical or continuing protection was occupied, and when there was no