REVIEW
17
market value - perhaps even expanding the scheme if resources allowed. Another idea is to expand the small civil engineering element within the construction industry to produce more new land at an accelerating rate to lower the level of prices which the private sector offer at public auctions of newly-produced building sites. But the dilemma in all but gradual solutions advanced remains: can Hong Kong cut the value of all the property already developed and the enormous land-bank of sites for re-development which developers own - exceeding the government's own land-bank resources without perhaps sending the excessively credit-supported private sector into a tailspin?
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In stark contrast with the general housing problem has been in recent years the simple solution found to maintain good order in the public housing estates - the introduction of trained and qualified managers for every 6 000 units aided by staff who collect the rent on a door-to-door basis from 800 tenants. When they knock on every door they get an earful of the tenants' complaints. And if they don't do something about necessary repairs, cleanli- ness and lights, etc. they keep getting more earfuls each time they collect the rent until the complaints are remedied. This, together with re-building or refurbishing old estates, has saved the public estates from what was a developing menace of a ghastly backwoods atmosphere amenable to criminals.
Transport
The other major current problem in Hong Kong is getting to work on time to undertake the daily struggle for self-betterment. A people who put a high premium on time will, in the years ahead, expect solutions from the newly-created Secretariat for Transport with overall authority to cut through the problems of what people expect to continue as one of the cheapest public transport systems in the world, and at the same time to make profits. The constraints are the same as on everything in the pressure-cooker of an unfavourable terrain that restricts roads and forces huge public expenditure on flyovers, tunnels, footbridges, car parks and subways to maintain a reasonable surface traffic flow. One solution is to go underground as we have begun to do, with the imaginative financing of another extension to our Mass Transit Railway by selling the space over underground stations in choice locations at today's high property prices. Hong Kong may have to do more than that as our pressure-cooker hisses and boils and rewards for successful development of human resources create problems like more and more motor-cars.
Diluting Immigrants
There seems little chance that Hong Kong may go off-the-boil in the foreseeable years ahead. Though entry from China is now frozen to Hong Kong belongers, we are still receiving an average of 150 a day from legal immigration, which amounts to 44 750 a year, excluding the six illegals that get through for every 10 caught at the border and return. Police pick up four to five of these people a day in the urban areas. Either they give themselves up because they don't enjoy their submerged life, or relatives and neighbours report them, or police stop-and-search dragnets eventually catch them. New identity cards, to be issued first to the main illegal immigrant age group, will help flush out remaining illegals and convince others not to try to come.
This action, dictated by necessity, presents a great paradox in the Hong Kong social chemistry. Indigestible influxes have throughout its history impact on Hong Kong but this ought to be the first time we have properly guarded ourselves against dangerously diluting our social chemistry which, indeed, over the years has drawn its strength from immigration. But immigrants who are 50 per cent farmers, hunters and fishermen are hardly the people