TNAG-0317-FCO40-353-Policy-of-housing-and-resettlement-in-Hong-Kong-problem-of-s-1971 — Page 134

washimichang

Page

6

1

工人學生政治行動委員會

WORKER-STUDENT POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE

from entrepot to industrial manufacturing centre. Without the enormous

quantities of refugee manpower available at very low rates, this would not

have been nearly so easy.

1

But how enormous were these resources of manpower ? According to Government statistics, the population increased from 600,000 at the end. of the Japanese occupation in 1945, to just over 3 million in the 1961

•

+

}

{ ་ ▪

$

Those statlation give a falso picture of floods of refugees swarming into Hong Kong in such numbers that the Government was unable to cope, and this incidontally servea a.s a partial justification for the fact that so little has, in fact, beon done for those people. The statistics do not point out that the population of the Colony was already 1,600,000 at the outbreak of the Japanese war, but was later reduced by a million as result of the Japanese occupation. A truer picture is given by the fact that the increase over the 11 year period 1945-56, a period which includes the return to Hong Kong of the British administration, as well as the

i

1

?

!

establishment of the Communist regime in China, was 1,900,000, of whom only 700,000 were refugees - fewer people, in fact, than are now officially listed as living in "temporary accommodation". (For the refugee figures see the Government Yearbook for 1956; for the accommodation figures the Government Yearbook for 1969, which is the latest available at the time of writing). The bulk of the increase consisted of returning residents (who presumably had homes before they loft, and so did not become squatters' on their return), immigrants from elsewhere, and a natural inɑronse in the population of about 75,000 n yone.

i

!

Since the Comminiat takeover in 1948 thora lng bonun atandy, but small trickle of refugees, which reached a ponit In 1962, whêm nhout 100,000 arrived. During 1966 (endelijk zijnski, kimgad

i there was an overall' balance of migration out

1.

of Hong Kong of 14,400, while in 1950 (the only other year for which we have been able to get figures), 200,000 people either returned to China or went elsewhere. (Source: Keith Hopkins; see below).

a

י

+

1

1 1

Just for the sake of comparison, it is interesting to noto that in the past ten years the mumber of refugees from East Germany returning t the Communist Republic was about half a million (Newsweek, 14/9/1970)

!

a figure which is five times the number who came to Hong Kong in the