TNAG-0786-FCO40-990-Policy-of-Government-of-Hong-Kong-on-labour-and-trade-union--1978 — Page 58

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XI. OTHER GENERAL IMPRESSIONS

We are fortunate in having the opportunity to visit six countries in various stages of economic and social development. Our terms of reference only required us to collect information on labour conditions and social security arrangements, and this we have done. We thought however that we should also record briefly in a separate section some very general impressions, unre lated. to labour and social security, which may be of interest to some readers.

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We were deeply impressed with the national discipline and civic attitude of people in Singapore and Korea The streets were very clean. People followed traffic lights and regulations, waited patiently for transport, and there was no jumping of queues. Taxi drivers in Singapore would not pick up people standing within walking distance of taxi stands where passengers had been queuing up. Koreans were extremely polite as a rule, but Singaporeans in ordinary walks of life were closely matching the less desirable standard in Hong Kong in terms of politeness and patience. Singaporeans and Koreans were extremely obedient to their Government and were most co-operative for the national development and welfare of their country. As pointed out earlier in this report, Singaporeans accept wage control and the freezing of fringe benefits imposed by their Government for the welfare of the country.

11.3

We were impressed with the fluency generally of Singaporeans, Malaysians and Filipinos in the English language. Like Chinese in Hong Kong, they too have native dialects and receive similar education, but for some reason or another the average Chinese in Hong Kong somehow compares less favourably in this regard.

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