ENG-1956 — Page 17

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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

the purpose and confused the achievement. 'Problems of the year,' the chapter might on occasion have been called.

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In this edition, instead of reviewing all the various prob- lems by which the Government of Hong Kong has been beset from January to December 1956, it is proposed to select a single problem which has been very much in our minds for the last ten years, and to give a brief account of its origin, nature and effect, and of the way in which it has been attacked (there is still no final solution to it) in the years since the war. This may not be an altogether inap- propriate course, because the problem selected is the Colony's King Charles's head and from an examination of it some- thing of the background to the general history of Hong Kong during these ten years will emerge.

Looking back over this period, one can say that there is little that has been done that would not have been done differently in some way if one problem had never existed. Finance, education, medical and health services, social welfare, prisons, police, industry, commerce, labour relations, land policy, housing, agriculture and fisheries, political relations- even the law itself-all bear the unmistakable surcharge (in a few cases an almost obliterating surcharge) of this single problem. It is the problem of a vast immigrant population; vast because for every resident of the Colony at the British reoccupation in 1945 there are now four residents.

A few figures will explain the position more precisely. The land area of the Colony of Hong Kong is 391 square miles. Of this 12 square miles are developed for residential, com- mercial or industrial purposes, 50 square miles are cultivated, and the remainder is largely hillside or swamp which is unsuitable for agriculture and could not be developed for other purposes without disproportionately heavy expenditure on site-formation or services. The immediately useable land area of the Colony is, therefore, 62 square miles. From this and from the fishing grounds within and around the waters of the Colony 500,000 people obtained their livelihood in