under review the department had acquired detailed information about 200,000 squatters, or former squatters, and in all this information there was nothing to suggest that even one half of the Colony's squatters could properly be described as refugees under any definition, however wide. No more can be said about this group of people than that they are the people whom the free play of the laws of economics has driven to construct illegal structures or, much more commonly, to rent space in illegal structures. Some are British subjects by birth, many have lived in Hong Kong for most of their lives, few want to live anywhere else, and some are not even of Chinese race.
85. Much more important, the normal development of normal social services had by the spring of 1954 been brought virtually to a standstill through the shortage of land. A most important and unusual deadlock had been reached, in that more public funds were available for the construction of low-cost housing and the expansion of social services—particularly educa- tional services-than could possibly be spent on the development of the limited areas of land remaining available. A situation had in fact arisen when much of the land occupied by squatters had to be recovered, first in order that certain major squatter fires should be prevented from taking place, and second in order that sites might be made available for flats, houses, schools, clinics, welfare centres, factories and shops, in short for all those developments which the economic and social requirements of the Colony demanded, but which could only proceed if squatters could somehow be cleared. The dramatic nature of this deadlock was by no means generally appreciated. Few people knew that in the general area of Li Cheng Uk and So Uk, in Shamshuipo, the squatter clearance programme, as it advanced during the year under review, removed the danger of a fire which could at one time have left 25,000 people homeless and could have cost the taxpayer $25,000 a day in unproductive direct relief alone. Fewer still understood the implications of the fact that a man standing on Lion Rock can see the homes, and the places of employment, of more people than live in the country of New Zealand. These are unusual circumstances and they call for unusual measures on the lines of those reported in the earlier
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