moderate rent, the Mobile Unit had accumulated a good deal of experience which now more than repaid the effort which had been put into training and preparation. Ten weeks from the issue of the first clearance notice a team of five quite junior officers had completed the clearance and resettlement of the re- maining 9,500 squatters of Li Cheng Uk. At the same time the Mobile Resettlement Unit was undertaking a number of other small clearances. By the end of the year under review it seemed unlikely that there would be any technical obstacle to the clearance and resettlement of perhaps as many as ten thousand persons a month in three or four simultaneous operations.
66. The success of any resettlement operation depends to a great extent on accurate knowledge of the particular squatter area and it may be of interest to describe the Li Cheng Uk Village area as it was before its population of about 25,000 was cut in half by this clearance. From the surrounding hills it gave the impression of an amorphous jumble of dilapidated wooden huts having only two things in common-the filth and the fire risk. In fact Li Cheng Uk, and it was in many respects typical of most squatter areas, was a complex and partly self sufficient community. The squatter village had grown up around the old village of the Li Clan, and hidden among the hundreds of illegal wooden huts were old stone houses on private land, some of them dating back to the last century. All the streets and alleyways had names, and every hut had a number. Most of the people were living in two-storey buildings and many were sub-tenants of absentee landlords. Many of the larger huts contained between one and two dozen cubicles, each occupied by a family of four or five persons. For a typical cubicle measuring about 40 square feet the monthly rent was about twenty dollars: perhaps more if there was a window and less if not. Most of the people were Cantonese and a high proportion had either lived in or visited Hong Kong before the second world war. Apart from Cantonese the main element consisted of Chiu Chow speaking people from the Swatow region. Practically none of them were living in Li Cheng Uk through choice; the shortage
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