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in quite a special position. has to worry along by the normal methods of respectable Crown colony procedure and finance, it will be left behind. The way to squander Hong Kong's present opportunity is to postpone large schemes and rigidly prune every activity of Government because the colony's budget, depleted and disorganised by the war, will not otherwise balance.
The local administration can do much but if it
8. Here following are four ways by which H.M.G. by helping Hong Kong, may make an investment in the future and the prospects of a fifth of the human
race.
9. The first thing is to try to create genuine citizens by giving the lower middle class of the colony something to be genuine about. The Municipal proposals are indispensable and of the first importance, but they are not by themselves enough. They will not stop any tenth-rate agitator from Canton being able to walk into the colony and almost at will start a riot on any pretext he chooses. What would stop him would be the fact that more Chinese owned their own homes. Home-owners like stability because they have some thing to protect. Therefore, Hong Kong requires a building scheme on building society lines where a man of small means pays, not rent, but monthly instalments towards the eventual purchase of the house he lives in. Commercial estimates already examined for such a scheme come out at too high a figure owing to the necessity to pay interest on capital. Government money
at low or no interest is required. At a guess perhaps £15,000,000 will be required to initiate the scheme which it should not be difficult to make eventually self-supporting. This does not seem a large price to pay for communal stability in a place with the potentialities of Hong Kong in reference to, say, the export market.
10.
The second thing is that the true development of Hong Kong as a modern city has been held up for two decades by the fact that the Admiralty and the War Office own and occupy valuable and extensive ground plumb in the heart of the town. Thus there are mule-lines on one side of the main street in Kowloon, a naval dockyard where liners of all the nations should berth on the Hong Kong side, and military barracks and a parade ground in the exact place where nature and man alike would site the City Hall and the Civic Centre. The soldiers and sailors were there first and the colony grew up round them. Negotiations over many years have not as yet yielded results, and what is required is a cold decision by H.M.G. that the so-called 'military lands' in Hong Kong shall be made available for civilian development as from 1948, planning on that basis to start now.
11.
The third thing is to build a modern airport the cost of which is estimated about £4,000,000. If we are not prepared to equip Hong Kong with a modern airport we really have no business to be there at all. The colony is the natural air terminal and junction for the South China region. Air carriers of all the world need and expect it. The present airfield at Kai Tak is wholly inadequate and highly dangerous: nothing larger than a two-engined plane is regularly permitted to use it. We owe South China and the world better than this. Colonial finance cannot at present look at a capital expenditure of £4,000,000: by the time it can, it will be too late.
12. The fourth thing is to seize the chance of getting in on the ground floor of the eventually practically unlimited China export field, by increasing now Hong Kong's quota of British goods for re-export. This would incidentally earn gold dollars, for China has them in quantity. There are endless enquiries to-day in the colony from merchants seeking goods of all kinds to sell in China. The allocations from the United Kingdom so far established to enable the colony to meet this demand barely touch the fringe of it. The South China market is one we would keep if once we got a reasonable foothold. Now is the time
13. And the last thing is a prayer that H.M-G will speedily accept the University proposals to re-establish what will in effect be the only institution devoted to higher learning from Manchuria to Hainan which is independent. The modern Sun Yat Sen may well be a student there: certainly he will not have the chance of being a student in China, as things are at present.