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REVIEW
and indeed society was making its own demands in greater aptitudes in factories, more innovation in offices and work places – particularly with the advent of the computer age
and far more ambitious and sophisticated enterprises to develop.
In education, this called not just for more free places and for more openings in pre- primary and secondary schools, but better teaching, a far greater variety of courses, the lifting of the lid on senior, technical and higher education and the expansion of adult education. In housing, the old norms of family togetherness had given way to a new style of youthful independence which saw more and more young people moving away from their parental home and, wherever they could afford it, trying to make a down-payment for their
own.
In welfare, the dry ration which was on the way out in 1970, was an anachronism by the end of the decade, and while Hong Kong has a long way to travel before it competes with the advanced welfare states of the West, it has at least assured the most indigent and helpless that they have a claim on the growing wealth and concern of our society.
In housing, years of frustration in the 1960s and 1970s as the government seemed to be trying to fill a bottomless well, led to new initiatives and bigger and more promising pro- grammes, assuring people of small flats rather than single but sub-dividable rooms and, in turn, home-ownership for people at the lower end of the economic scales. At the same time, these new estates could no longer be confined to the so-called urban areas. New cities would be needed in the old but increasingly unproductive rural areas.
Imaginative Planning
In recreation, it was not enough to tell people to amuse themselves. A far-sighted Urban Council built parks and swimming pools and subsidised concerts and entertainment at a variety of localities. And the government opened up Country Parks covering more than 40 per cent of Hong Kong's land area, as well as recreation and sports centres and summer holiday camps. Even a new racecourse at Sha Tin led to the formation of a major new enterprise in the coaching of sports which hopefully will put local sportsmen more frequently among the medal winners at international competitions. Hong Kong took off in the late 1970s on a quest for a quality of life that would prove satisfying to people with widely differing tastes and inclinations.
In medical and health services, Hong Kong foresaw that its own needs for doctors and dentists could never be met without a major expansion of university places. The new dental institution for training nurses and technicians, the dental school at the University of Hong Kong and a medical faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong will comple- ment what the old medical school at the University of Hong Kong for years shouldered on its own.
But more than trained personnel were needed. As in developed societies in other parts of the world, the nature of illness had changed and the old infectious diseases which ravaged an ill-fed, ill-housed and undernourished populace in the post-war years, were passing. Life expectancy moved rapidly ahead and the British examiners who came to inspect medical teaching at the University of Hong Kong in 1980, felt that one area that needed particular attention was the problem of the geriatric - a hitherto neglected field for a community with many more urgent priorities in the post-war years. This view echoed what social workers had been saying about institutional facilities for the aged. Far more places were needed in these times when fewer and fewer old people could expect to remain with a young, active and increasingly outdoors family.