ENG-1956 — Page 45

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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

claims of one section of the community cannot continue indefinitely. And to accept the squatter into the community implies more than building a roof over his head. There is schooling, for example. The primary school expansion pro- gramme alone will cost $55 million over the next five years. That is for the benefit of the whole Colony, but it seems logical to assume that the present and former squatters, representing as they do some 20% of the community, will in fact derive a disproportionate share of the benefit, and that that share might be available for higher, as opposed to primary, education if the squatters did not exist. Clinics and hospitals are perhaps a more pressing need. These cannot really wait. The new communities themselves provide a most fertile ground for epidemic diseases and for the traditional scourge of tuberculosis. And then there are the social services. How is one to hope to integrate these new communities, which Government is creating as fast as its resources will allow, into the existing social system unless a special and equally comprehensive effort is made throughout the whole range of social welfare? More land is needed for industry; trade relations become vital. The potentialities, as has been said, are both good and bad. More prisons are needed, more courts of justice, a larger and more mobile police force, an inflated administrative machine. Some element in all these requirements is directly attributable to what has been done, and is still being done, in this single sphere of resettlement. It is perhaps not too much to say that the people of Hong Kong have pledged a portion of their own future for the benefit of strangers who took refuge here;-and sometimes it almost looks as if they are also required to pay interest on the pledge at compound rates.

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