Chapter 11: Social Welfare
THE Hong Kong visual exhibit at the Ninth International Con- ference of Social Work in Tokyo at the end of 1958 had as its central feature an enormous photograph of densely packed but orderly lines of people queueing for food, after the great fire of Christmas night 1953 had deprived over 50,000 squatters of their flimsy homes in a few hours; superimposed on the photograph was the steep red line of a population graph; above it in bold letters was written the theme: "Tackling Hong Kong's Problem of People'. Below and on either side appeared a series of photo- graphs depicting first the environment, from squatter shacks and cubicles in slum tenements to resettlement cottages and seven- storey estates; then selected illustrations of the efforts being made to meet social needs-clubs and schools on rooftops in the estates, casework centres, children's libraries, clinics, food distribution and so on. This exhibit was designed to give delegates a strong im- pression of teeming population in a narrow space; the many who visited Hong Kong after the Conference obtained vivid confirma- tion by visiting a resettlement estate, where thirty to fifty thousand live in a 'new town', not yet a community, of eleven acres. This brief description may serve also as an introduction to the problems of social welfare in the present Report.
Such is the setting; and refugees from China still enter illegally. In the course of the past ten years it is estimated that approxi- mately one million persons have come into Hong Kong from China. These figures bear comparison with the far more widely publicized refugee problem of Berlin, different though that problem is in many respects.
In the fields of housing, education and public health great strides have been made, as will be apparent from other chapters in this Report, although the goal tends constantly to recede because of the very high rate of population increase, which approached 8% during the year. The problems in the field of social welfare are further immensely aggravated by poverty due to lack of employment, or