THE BOAT REFUGEES FROM VIETNAM
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dwellings of some 50,000 squatters in the Shek Kip Mei district of Kowloon. Only a large-scale, publicly-administered remedy could suffice: within weeks, the first blocks of public housing began to rise. In the years that followed multi-storey estates were con- structed to progressively higher standards - throughout the urban area. By 1971, about one-third of the population lived in public, or publicly-subsidised, housing. Today, the proportion is about 40 per cent but Hong Kong still has more than one million people living in huts, old overcrowded tenements, and other makeshift and inadequate accommodation.
Of the various schemes aimed at social improvement, it is not surprising that housing has been the spearhead, winning priority in the allocation of land and attracting world- wide attention because of the scale of its projects. A 10-year housing programme, launched in 1973 and having as its target the rehousing of 1.8 million people by the mid-1980s, is being implemented through the construction of six large new towns in the New Territories, with much of the building taking place on land reclaimed from the sea.
For the success of such a vast programme, as for the schemes providing new hospitals and schools, it follows that a reliable planning base depends on stable population projec- tions. Sudden large-scale immigration can only be regarded with dread, both by squatters waiting in a seven-year housing queue and by town planners, engineers, architects and administrators.
Yet, ironically, the ambitious New Territories Development Programme must have been enticing to would-be immigrants in China, as word spread there of whole new townships rising at phenomenal speed. Ironically, too, it was when the 10-year housing programme had gathered momentum and was entering its third year that, on April 30, 1975, the city of Saigon fell to the communist forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong.
Enter the Freighters
Hong Kong was to experience firsthand the consequences of this momentous event within a few days. On May 4, 1975, when the Queen was beginning her visit to Hong Kong, the Danish container ship, Clara Maersk, arrived in the harbour with 3,743 refugees rescued in the South China Sea. All were landed in Hong Kong, and at very short notice camps were set up to house them until they could be resettled overseas. This process of resettlement was not completed till mid-1978.
The years 1976 and 1977 were marked by a relative lull in the problem, with less than 1,200 refugees arriving in small boats. But it was during this period that Hong Kong took in about 9,000 displaced people and refugees from Indo-China who had either overstayed or entered illegally after changes of government in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Charter planes were sent to Vietnam to collect another 4,522 people who had never been resident in Hong Kong, but who had close family ties with Hong Kong residents. An additional 450 people came by commercial flights. Eventually, those given refuge in Hong Kong in these ways totalled more than 14,000.
In 1978 the inflow of refugees in small boats increased to a total of 6,609. But the most alarming development was the steadily mounting evidence, in the second half of the year, that Vietnam's authorities were prepared to 'export', as unassimilable politically and economically, a large proportion of the country's Chinese population.
Reports began to reach Hong Kong that people of Chinese ethnic origin throughout Vietnam, who had already been reduced to the status of second class citizens through dismissal from jobs, suppression of businesses and confiscation of property, were now being presented with the direst of options: removal as labourers to 'new economic zones'