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of Mong Kok in Kowloon had 400,612-- more than nine times greater than the density of Tokyo City. Over 230,000 squatters live on the hillsides and roof- tops. The 1971 Census shows that among the economically active population 623,531 lived in a room or cubicle 53,896 lived in a temporary structure " 27,260 lived in a "verandah, cockloft, basement, storeroom, corridor, etc."; 13,775 lived in a "bed space"; 9,156 in a "roof shack"; and 1,246 in a "dere- lict boat." In 5,350 dwellings there were ten or more persons per room or cubicle, and later that year the South China Morning Post (9 December 1971) re- ported that 50 people were living in one flat 15 feet by 35. In September 1975 en- gineers investigating underground cables discovered a man who had set up home beneath a man-hole cover in Nathan Road, Kowloon's main thoroughfare (Hong Kong Standard, 14 September 1975).
On Christmas Day 1953 a huge fire made 50,000 squatters homeless. This forced the Government into a long term massive public housing scheme which by the end of 1975 had resettled 1.2 million people -30 per cent of the population. But this extraordinary achievement in terms of quantity has been marred by the Govern- ment's characteristic disregard for human dignity. For ten years, up to 1964, the Government persisted with its original, basic, emergency design of resettlement.
This consisted of an estate of 20 build- ings, each of 6, 7 or 8 storeys but without lifts. Accommodation was provided in one room flats on an allowance of 24 square feet per person-twice the area of a grave. The cubicles for personal wash- ing had no doors and no fitments apart from a drain, so water from a communal tap had to be carried to them in buckets; the lavatories too had no doors, and con- sisted of an open horizontal trench auto- matically flushed every 15 minutes. Totally inadequate provision was made for education, recreation or policing. An average of 44,000 people lived in each estate. This indeed is what the Ham- monds, in a different context, referred to as "the barracks of an industry.” Half a
million people live in these conditions, a result of deliberate Government planning. Later resettlement estates, starting in 1964, had private water taps and bal- conies, a lavatory between each two rooms, electrical fittings and refuse chutes. The latest version has larger rooms to allow the new allocation of 35 square feet per person.
No-one can deny that housing the poor in Hong Kong is a task to daunt even the bravest. But the Government's much vaunted efforts are seen more and more by outside observers as the building of cheap slums. Ironically, in 1972 the Com- monwealth Conference on Development and Human Ecology was held in Hong Kong. The delegates went on a tour of the resettlement estates and were "in- credulous and shocked by the government slums" (South China Morning Post, 27 April 1972). The newspaper commented:
Hong Kong has a reputation abroad for being a pioneer in providing low cost housing on a massive scale, but the dele- gates were appalled to see the human cost of such a crash building programme. In the view of another expert, with long experience of conditions in the Colony, the resettlement programme
"has not been based primarily upon the need to assist low income families to obtain decent housing. It has been rather a means of squatter control, devised in order to free land needed for permanent develop- ment and to reduce the risk of fires in squatter camps (D. J. Dwyer, in Dwyer, ed, Asian Urbanization: A Hong Kong Casebook, Hong Kong University Press, 1971).
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the businessman knows best These harsh and unimaginative social policies are the inevitable accompani- ment of the Government's explicit philo- sophy that the private entrepreneur knows better than anyone else what is best for him, his business, and his workers. The Government devotes itself therefore to providing the circumstances in which business can flourish.
There is no income tax as such in Hong
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