ENG-1961 — Page 21

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REVIEW

size of his household is needed. In some countries these can be supplied from electoral rolls, parish registers and similar adminis- trative records. In Hong Kong there is no citizens' register, no electoral roll except for the Urban Council, and almost no adminis- trative records survived the Japanese occupation. There is, in short, no source from which a comprehensive list of household heads can be obtained, and to have obtained this preliminary information prior to the census would have been almost as much work as taking the census itself. Secondly, this was to be the first census in thirty years, and there was a host of topics about which the planners badly required information. Even after ruthless pruning the census questions still numbered twenty two, and many of them would elicit intelligible answers only if put by a trained enumerator.

In some societies people change their addresses rarely, their job seldom, their status never; and so they can maintain systems of registration from which at any moment an almost up-to-date head count with tabulation by status, employment and place of residence can be made. Hong Kong is not such a society. The Colony has a registration system, but it is not a registration of status, merely the provision of identity cards for residents, and few are the occasions when anyone's status is called into question. Changes of- address are frequent-in the ten days preceding census day on 7th March, thirteen thousand people moved house! Labour is fluid and adaptable and there are no artificial and few natural obstacles to prevent a man changing his job for one he likes better or one which is better paid.

Countries of the former kind, which includes many predomi- nantly agricultural communities, with an immobile labour force and a static society, find it more useful to record for census pur- poses the status and permanent description of each citizen, his usual abode and occupation, and a census of this kind (known as a de jure census) is held in about one-third of the countries in the world. Countries with a predominantly industrial population, a mobile labour force and a fluid society, prefer to record the actual situation at a moment of time. This is known as a de facto census and it was a census of this kind which was held in Hong Kong.

Thus the Hong Kong census figures include everybody of what- ever nationality, who happened to be within the Colony and its