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The China Incident (for the Japanese would never grace it with any more realistic appellation) had several repercussions in Hong Kong. In the first six months of the war which was to continue for just over eight years, about a hundred thousand refugees were added to the population numbering, at that date, just under a million. Many of these came from Shanghai and a smaller proportion from the five Northern Provinces.
On the whole and with the exception of a comparatively small number of European and "white" Russian families, the refugees who arrived in Hong Kong`in 1937 were able to fend for themselves, at least for a time.
Some, indeed, were in a position to establish or to transfer from the North factories making cotton goods, torches, rubber-sole shoes, and the like, benefiting from the Empire prefer- ence scheme, now to disappear under the Bretton Woods Agreement.
As might be expected, overcrowding of tenements which has been a problem in Hong Kong for decades, became aggravated by the influx of refugees. Some had sufficient funds to enable them to pay higher rents than the ordinary residents in Hong Kong.
In time, this resulted in good citizens being crowded out and rendered homeless, a situation which the Hong Kong Government did its best to prevent, but without much success.
As the tide of war rolled south and Kwang Tung was invaded in the Autumn of 1938, ending with the capture of Canton and the occupetion of Chinese territory right up to the ino-British Border, so more and more refugees poured into Hong Kong.
Many were destitute and accepted work at wages which were insufficient to maintain health, thereby ousting workers normally resident in Hong Kong. Serious housing congestion, over- filling of hospitals (so that two or more occupied a single bed and patients lay on the floor and even under the beds), outbreaks of cerebro-spinal meningitis, cholera and smallpox, and deaths from beri-beri, pellagra and other deficiency diseases became the order of the day.
In an attempt to combat this, the Hong Kong Government introduced an Immigration Restriction Ordinance. It, also, permitted the Medical Department to organise a number of temporary and semi- permanent camps, In these, many thousand refugees and homeless and destitute women and children were cared for. Where practicable, they were repatriated to their ancestral villages in Chinese territory, with gifts of food, clothing, farm implements and, occasionally, even plough oxen. This repatriation was only feasible in cases where the villages were situated in regions distant from the actual fighting
zone.
Soon after the outbreak of war between China and Japan, the Hong Kong Government realised that the Colony might be involved. Military and civilian defence schemes were drawn up. Stores of rice, soya beans, groundnut oil and other requirements for a basic ration, and supplies of fuel were built up for a population of 1 millions (of whom million were refugees) for a period of four months.
Trade, which had expanded in 1937-1939 owing to the large access of population and to important transhipments into Free China, fell in 1941 because of the tightening of the blockade of Hong Kong by the Japanese and on account of the shipping shortage, from diversion of ships to meet more pressing demands in European theatres of war.
This factor, combined with the voluntary, Government- assisted repatriation of Chinese and the compulsory evacuation of the greater proportion of European women and children," and, to a minor