CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
THE SQUATTER PROBLEM, 1947 - 1956
SQUATTER colonies had existed on a small scale before the war when large numbers of immigrants entered the Colony as a result of the Japanese invasion of the Province of Kwangtung but it was not until 1947 that the problem became serious because of the continuing stream of post-war immigrants, many of whom could not find normal accommodation since serious damage had been done to pre-war buildings by bombing and looting during the years 1941 to 1945.
2. In 1948 the Government took action to require squatters occupying bombed sites in the central districts to move to sites on the fringes of the urban areas which were at the time not required for permanent development. A year later however this solution had proved to be inadequate because the stream of immigrants had increased gradually to a flood as the Chinese Civil War spread southwards. As a result the population had increased from an estimated 600,000 in 1945 to a figure of about 2 million in
in 1949, of whom some 300,000 had found accommodation for themselves in wooden shacks so densely concentrated that many of these new squatter areas had a population of anything between 30,000 and 60,000 persons,
3. The first of the big squatter fires occurred in January 1950 when 20,000 persons were made homeless in the Kowloon City district. This fire made it clear that large squatter colonies were becoming a menace to the Colony as a whole-not only because they presented a serious and ever increasing fire hazard, but because sanitary conditions in them were so bad that there was a threat of epidemics which would spread to other parts of the urban areas of Hong Kong and Kowloon. Moreover, every squatter fire was costly to the taxpayer since it resulted in considerable expenditure on emergency relief measures, including the provision of free meals for large numbers of persons. But perhaps the most serious aspect of
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