ENG-1956 — Page 18

REVIEW

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1931. At the outbreak of the Japanese war the population had increased to 1,600,000. On the British reoccupation in 1945 the wholesale expulsions enforced by the Japanese had reduced that number to 600,000. By the end of 1946 the population was 1,600,000; by 1950 it was 2,360,000 and by the end of 1956 something over 2,500,000. Not all of the increase between 1945 and 1956 (nearly two million) was immigrant population. Perhaps a figure of 400,000 represents the natural increase in the population and a further 400,000 the people who were residents of the Colony before the war and returned to it after the Japanese surrender. The increase between 1945 and 1956 due to immigration was, therefore, somewhere about one million, and of this number Dr. Hambro, who conducted a survey on behalf of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1954, has estimated that about 700,000 were refugees. Hong Kong was already over-crowded in 1941 and to arrive at a 'normal' population in relation to the Colony's actual state of develop- ment it is necessary to look back rather further to, say, 1937 when the population was about 1,200,000. The annual rate of natural increase is at present about 75,000.

We have, therefore, a total area of 391 square miles (of while 62 square miles is immediately useable) with a normal capacity of about 1,200,000 persons. This area is now re- quired to accommodate over 2,500,000 persons and to absorb a rate of natural increase of 75,000 per annum. New Zealand has an area of 103,939 square miles, a population of 2,153,000 and a rate of natural increase of 27,000 per annum.

There is the size of the problem, but how and why did it arise? In the years before the Pacific War it was the policy, indeed almost a tradition, to allow freedom of movement to Chinese across the border with China. There were many reasons for this. Economically, Hong Kong was at that time the entrepôt for the great market of China. Goods arrived in bulk from all over the world and were unloaded into the warehouses of Hong Kong. There they were broken