PROGRESS
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is near the truth, because even the most hardened cynics would find these achievements difficult to gainsay. The facts are for all to see. However, this is not the whole truth: there is, of course, much to be done. There are imperfections, shortcomings, unfilled crannies. While acclaiming Hong Kong's progress and indeed demanding some honest but modest acknowledgement of it, the Colony and the Government are too experienced to pretend that this is El Dorado- yet. For many people in the world life here would be relative para- dise, and, in fact, Hong Kong can now claim that it has the second highest standard of living in Asia, which is no mean achievement for a place which was left virtually in ruins after the 1939-45 war, but Hong Kong knows that it is still scaling mid-ranges. The efforts cannot be relaxed: to be smug or to accept a levelling off is to invite disaster. Export industries need to find still more new markets and new, attractive high-quality products, that innovate instead of merely improve and cheapen. People must adapt to the pressures for a wider dispersal of the population. More jobs, more-school places, more amenities have to be placed within the reach of the expanding population but, above all, in this competitive world productivity has to be yet further increased. Better transport facili- ties need to be provided. Solutions to the mercurial difficulties_faced or created by hawkers need to be found. The battle against-drug traffic and the efforts to rehabilitate the addicted must continue. Some further devolution of administration may have to be devised. The aged and the mentally unfit need better care. The inventory is long, tough and costly and increasingly the challenges will be social. Many of these shortcomings are of course the result of the great influx of people into Hong Kong in the years since the war. While those immigrants provided an undoubted asset in many ways, they exerted heavy pressure on the various social and economic services provided by the Government.
It is in the nature of the Hong Kong resident to be constantly aware of such things. Sometimes because he thinks more than he talks, he is accused of being blind to them. How then did the vast changes of the last two decades ever come to pass? It will be for the chroniclers in the years to come to record how, step by step, the Hong Kong people and its Government faced up to and over- came present-day problems and deficiencies almost entirely from the wealth they created themselves, with characteristic diligence,