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Welsh manages to be both succinct and vivid in giving an impression of Hong Kong today. He observes that Hong Kong's life-expectancy statistics are better than Britain's, and its per capita gross domestic product is greater. More interestingly he compares Hong Kong to another colony, Puerto Rico, which has four million people, rather than six, and has been under American control since 1898, the same year that much of Hong Kong became a colony. Infant mortality and life expectancy figures are far better in Hong Kong, while the crime rate is lower, the rates of literacy higher, and the quality of public transport superior. Hong Kong is much safer and cleaner than New York.
Little evidence of its colonial past remains in the architecture of the famous skyline, Welsh observes, and where Queen Victoria's statue once stood, 'the only memorial is now entirely appropriate for this temple of commerce - that of a bank manager.' New towns, housing over two million people, stand where once squatter settlements spread, linked by 'the sparklingly clean and efficient Metro and the modernized railway.' He points out that notwithstanding Hong Kong's modern skyline, 'at street level... the crowds are as Chinese as those of Canton and Shanghai.'
But Welsh is right to point out a great truth. While the colony was for too long run on authoritarian lines, he says, 'there is no society in Asia that has enjoyed for so long as Hong Kong the freedom that democracy is commonly supposed to guarantee.'
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Welsh manages to be both succinct and vivid in giving an impression of Hong Kong today. He observes that Hong Kong's life-expectancy statistics are better than Britain's, and its per capita gross domestic product is greater. More interestingly he compares Hong Kong to another colony, Puerto Rico, which has four million people, rather than six, and has been under American control since 1898, the same year that much of Hong Kong became a colony. Infant mortality and life expectancy figures are far better in Hong Kong, while the crime rate is lower, the rates of literacy higher, and the quality of public transport superior. Hong Kong is much safer and cleaner than New York.
Little evidence of its colonial part remains in the architecture of the famous skyline, Welsh observes, and where Queen Victoria's statue once stood, 'the only memorial is now entirely appropriate for this temple of commerce - that of a bank manager.' New towns, housing over two million people, stand where once squatter setttlements spread, linked by 'the sparklingly clean and efficient Metro and the modernized railway.` He points out that notwithstanding Hong Kong's modern skyline, ‘at street level... the crowds are as Chinese as those of Canton and Shanghai.'
But Welsh is right to point out a great truth. While the colony was for too long run on authoritarian lines, he says. 'there is no society in Asia that has enjoyed for so long as Hong Kong the freedom that democracy is commonly supposed to guarantee.'
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