CO129-487 - Others & Individuals - 1924 — Page 562

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to invalidate at once any comparison with places like Formosa, the Netherlands East Indies, or the Philippines, which are distinct from China, and where the Chinese are an alien and not an indigenous race and form a very small fraction of the total population. Even in such of these territories as have adopted them, the systems of registration and rationing of opium smokers have (in the view of the Governor of the Straits Settlements) achieved only limited success as regards the indigenous populations and no success, amounting practically to failure, when it is sought to impose the same measures on the Chinese. The Governor also makes a point of the fact that registration and rationing would check the flow of emigration of Chinese into Malaya, with very serious effects upon the labour supply and the prosperity of that country, and there would also, of course, be very serious effects on Hong Kong, if any measures taken impeded the free movement of Chinese from China to the Colony.

1. In Hong Kong, in the view of the Hong Kong Committee (in which the Governor concurs), no system involving individual control of opium smokers (such as is involved in a system of registration and licensing) is possible. The keynotes to the situation are the undoubted existence of a widespread demand for opium for the purposes of smoking, the complete absence of any public opinion condemning the practice, the existence of unlimited supplies of Chinese, Turkish, and Persian opium, and in the circumstances outlined above, the virtual impossibility of...

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