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different considerations have applied.
DSR 11C (Revised 5/87)
Indeed, when
relatively modest proposals for constitutional reform
were made by the then Governor in the period following
the Second World War, they met with virtually no public
support in Hong Kong. The territory was preoccupied with
absorbing and accommodating very large numbers of
migrants, mainly from China, and with adjusting
economically to the loss of its entrepot trade with China
as a result of the Korean war. As a measure of the size
of the problem, Hong Kong's population rose sharply from
about 600,000 in August 1945 to an estimated 1.8 million
by the end of 1947, and to some 2.2 million by the middle
of 1950.
29.
The priority for a large proportion of this
transient and highly mobile population was that Hong Kong
should be an environment in which they could settle and
make a prosperous living, rather than the development of
representative government. It was not until the mid -
1960s that consideration of constitutional changes
resumed, but again external events intervened: the
Cultural Revolution in China and the consequential
disturbances in Hong Kong threatened the very existence
of the territory. A further consideration, to which many
people in the community attached particular weight, was
the fear that the introduction of party politics on
western lines would serve to polarise the community and
to reproduce in Hong Kong the rivalries that continued to
exist between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists.
Such rivalries could have had a seriously destabilising
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