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REGULATION OF CLUBS AND SOCIETIES.
Ordinance No. 47 of 1911.
73. During the year 40 applications for registration or exemption from registration under the Ordinance were received and considered. Eight clubs and societies were exempted from registration by notice in the Gazette, while 20 were required to register. In one case permission to register was refused on the ground specified in section 4 of the Ordinance; 9 clubs were found to comprise less than 10 members and did not therefore come under the Ordinance. In the remaining two cases no action was taken and the clubs concerned voluntarily dissolved.
One society exempted in previous years but lately discovered to be non-existent was declared in the Gazette to have ceased to exist and was struck off the register.
ORDINANCES.
74. The only Ordinance affecting the Chinese which was passed during 1916 was No. 10, the Tobacco Ordinance, making tobacco a dutiable article and putting the tobacco trade on the same footing as the liquor trade.
GENERAL.
75. Under the terms of the Deportation Ordinance, 1914, reports were furnished on 272 suspects arrested by the Police under warrants of detention. The figure in 1915 was 298.
76. Reports were also furnished on numerous other criminals recommended by the Police for banishment on the expiration of their sentences who claimed to be Hongkong born.
77. In the summer, owing to what practically amounted to civil war in the neighbourhood of Canton, the Colony, as in 1913, was inundated with a flood of refugees. These are estimated to have numbered 100,000. One of the local missions approached the office with a view to helping Christian converts among these to find shelter, but the trouble subsided before the difficulty became acute.
78. With the help of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and through other channels, a number of pamphlets and booklets in Chinese supporting the Allied cause were distributed both in Hong-kong and in the interior.
79. Labour Troubles.-The only serious labour trouble during the year was a strike of the boilermakers—chiefly unskilled labour—at the Hunghom Docks. These men had long had a guild, the Hop Wo Tong, which became so powerful that it was able to force a strike, with the object of monopolising the work in the yard and of limiting output, which was not generally popular and was only kept going by means of "picketing" and intimidation.
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