ENG-1951 — Page 25

I

POPULATION

The population of the Colony is believed to be slightly over 2,000,000, but until a census can be held any estimate given must of necessity be regarded as tentative.

A census has not been held in Hong Kong since 1931 when the population was found to be 849,751. Another census should have been held in 1941 but with the Japanese assault on China in 1937 conditions became unsettled and Hong Kong became subject to a long succession of fluctuations of population which have only very recently shown indications of subsiding.

The first of these fluctuations occurred as a result of the initial Japanese successes against the Chinese forces, causing a considerable influx of refugees into Hong Kong. This influx increased in 1938 when the Japanese attacked Canton.

In 1941,

when Canton was still occupied by the Japanese but before Great Britain had been drawn into open warfare with Japan, an unofficial census was carried out by the air raid wardens of Hong Kong who assessed the population at slightly over 1,600,000. Shortly after this, in December of the same year, the Colony was attacked and overrun by the Japanese, and a great number of erstwhile refugees together with many long-established Hong Kong Chinese families began leaving the Colony in an attempt to reach either their ancestral homes or free China. This, combined with a systematic policy of the Japanese to reduce the population of Hong Kong, lowered the population by over a million and it is thought that there were not much more than 500,000 people left here when the Colony was liberated from the Japanese in 1945.

From then on the population rose steadily and by the end of 1946 was estimated at its immediately pre-war level of 1,600,000. By the end of 1947 the estimate was 1,800,000 and then, as a result of unsettled conditions in China caused by the civil war and the increasing successes of the Communist armies, yet another influx of refugees from the mainland commenced. This reached its height in the spring of 1950 when the estimated population was 2,360,000.

23