ENG-1980 — Page 10

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Hong Kong:

Yesterday and Today-A Personal View

by Robin Hutcheon, Editor of the South China Morning Post

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It has been a year when the futurists have dominated the headlines of the Hong Kong press with grim forebodings and woeful tidings, as much because of the unresolved status of the New Territories lease, as because of the unchecked influx of immigrants who helped boost Hong Kong's population by 6.3 per cent in 1979. But it is perhaps timely to offer the view that all this agonising is an exercise in futility. There is unlikely to be a firm under- taking on Hong Kong's future, however much we may desire it, when 17 years must seem an age away for the present Chinese leaders. It is hard enough indeed to predict what might happen 17 days, or weeks, hence. As for the effects of massive immigration, perhaps hind- sight is more valuable than foresight, for we have experienced it all before. So let us indulge in a retrospect:

When the Japanese occupation ended in 1945, it left a hollow, broken shell of a city, little different from the one that died in December, 1941. However dedicated the surviving administrators who marched out of Stanley camp to get things moving, however capable the temporary military administration which took over, and however resilient the com- mercial and business community which put Hong Kong back on its feet a year later, as always it was the people who provided the lifeblood and determined that it would survive. And just as they deserted the city in its death throes in 1941, so they returned in 1945 and 1946 as the pulse of life began to beat again.

Yet no sooner had Hong Kong respectably recovered its pre-war stability than civil war in China rattled at its gates. Newcomers began arriving, bringing with them new ideas, new ways and new capital from the sister city of Shanghai. Industrialists, workers, but above all people with a will to live and thrive, poured in to make Hong Kong a com- munity more crowded and in many ways more impoverished (but eventually much richer) than it had ever been before.

In the year 1980 we watched apprehensively and uncertainly as a similar process took place, though for different reasons. But however much we disliked what was happening (and short of an economic miracle in China, the latest wave of immigrants is unlikely to return), it is in Hong Kong's interests to try and get the best out of them and ensure they contribute usefully to their adopted community. For they will learn soon enough that there are no streets paved with gold, no handouts for shirkers, no indulgence for the wayward, no future for the useless and sharp shocks for the law-breakers.

Hong Kong has learned to live for the day and neither to bemoan the past nor begrudge the future. And so it has always been. The greatest challenge Hong Kong faces lies in the present and we can only plan hopefully for the time to come. The overthrow of one government and its replacement by another in China in the 1950s brought not only massive new population here but major problems as well. The outbreak of war in Korea led to the United Nations embargo on trade with China. No community or territory suffered more