1
鳳
Hong Kong-Building for the Future
蛋花
ONE striking fact about Hong Kong is that, physically, it is, in so many ways a new city. Aspects of it which its inhabitants now take for granted, but which they have come to rely on and have built into the fabric of their lives, did not exist even a few years ago.
Nine years ago there was no Mass Transit Railway, which now carries nearly two million passengers a day. The Island Line, indeed, was opened less than three years ago. Six years ago there were no electric trains, which now carry almost 350 000 passengers daily to and from the New Territories. Ten years ago the now thriving and bustling commercial and shopping centre of East Tsim Sha Tsui was a near-empty wasteland.
The spectacular new towns were little more than rural villages less than 15 years ago. And the strategic road network, which now stretches from Hong Kong Island to the further reaches of the New Territories, was then no more than a planners' blueprint. At that time, also, the Cross-Harbour Tunnel had only just opened to end the era when the only means of getting from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon was by ferry. The Kwai Chung container port, now the second largest in the world in terms of throughput and bidding to become the largest, was empty seabed only 20 years ago. And, perhaps as significant as anything, 30 years ago none of the hundreds of high rise buildings, which now surround the harbour in such profusion, existed.
Almost all the old pre-war Hong Kong has by now been swept away, in a 30-year frenzy of construction which has completely transformed the whole face of the territory from the Central business district to some of the remoter parts of the New Territories.
All this means that Hong Kong has been building for the future almost continuously for more than a generation. The process has been going on without stop since the late 1950s, in some years more intensively than in others, although even the relatively quiet periods would have appeared busy in most other places. In boom years, particularly during the late seventies and early eighties indeed, parts of Hong Kong were almost literally transformed into continuous building sites.
The results have been spectacular, not only in the physical development of the territory, but also in the overall scale of its economy and the standard of living of its inhabitants. The Hong Kong of the mid-fifties was poor and dilapidated, still struggling to adjust to the ravages of the Second World War and the loss of much of its entrepôt trade. Many of its 2.5 million inhabitants were recent immigrants from China, squatting on hillsides or on rooftops and lucky to find employment at subsistence wages. Now Hong Kong is a modern and thriving metropolis of about 5.6 million people, fully employed and much better housed, one of the major centres of world trade, communications and finance and with a standard of living that has increased four or five times in a generation.
The rate of development, moreover, is continuing at a fast pace. Numbers of large new projects are either being built or are planned to start soon. Beyond them, plans are being