half millions, compared with 650,000 in 1945. Well over a third are recent immigrants and their children. Seventy per cent live in severely cramped housing conditions around the fringes of the harbour. Between 1954 and 1963 the Government resettlement programme had rehoused more than six hundred thousand citizens in twelve highly compressed 'new towns', each with a population ranging between 30,000 and 80,000; including the resettlement cottage areas, these account for some 17% of the popula- tion. Many thousands of families have thus been rehoused but have little feeling of neighbourliness towards those next door and very little leisure in which to develop a sense of community. Such conditions present formidable difficulties in any attempt to encourage the new citizens to play a part themselves in the development of a coherent society.
13. However the Youth Welfare section of the department has made a solid beginning, through the community and social centres set up in the resettlement estates and the new towns, in bringing their inhabitants intimately together; attracting them to the centres, which provide a host of welfare services and group activities, and then stimulating through these centres the development of a community spirit. The first centre at Wong Tai Sin Estate near the Airport is now nearly four years old; the second was completed a year later in the rapidly growing industrial town of Tsuen Wan. At the Wong Tai Sin and Tsuen Wan Centres the Mary- knoll Sisters and the Hong Kong Young Women's Christian Association respectively provide a day nursery for two hundred children between the ages of two and six who need care while their parents are at work; the Chinese YMCA organizes a variety of group activities in each centre for young people, eighty or more of whom come together every evening for folk dancing or sport or to develop other interests or skills. Practical training classes in motor vehicle and electrical repairs are run by the Hong Kong Christian Welfare and Relief Council in the Wong Tai Sin Centre; these courses lead to ready employment, and at present three hundred boys aged 15 or over are being trained. At Tsuen Wan, Lutheran World Service provides similar facilities for two hundred young people of 16 years or over. The Hong Kong Family Welfare Society, whose work is referred to in paragraph 55, provides casework services at both centres. The Department is responsible for the general management of the centres and for a library of 25,000 volumes, nearly all Chinese, as well as periodicals and newspapers; this amenity is highly valued by children and adults alike, attracting up to a thousand users a day. The Department
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