ENG-1987 — Page 19

HONG KONG BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

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telecommunications facilities all essential for trade and other economic relations. The business of the territory has centred on the harbour since its beginnings and still does. In recent decades the major activities of the port have tended to shift westwards from the central harbour area and this process was accelerated when, in 1968, construction began on the new container port at Kwai Chung. In terms of throughput, this is now the second busiest container port in the world. As already indicated, plans are in hand to add two more terminals to the five already in operation.

The airport, too, has had to be constantly expanded to meet increasing traffic demands for passengers and freight. This has involved lengthening the runway, an almost continuous growth in terminal facilities for passengers and freight, and improvements in instrumenta- tion. Efficient telecommunications, both internal and external, have been another vital factor in the development of Hong Kong as a leading industrial, commercial and financial centre. Here again, facilities have been continuously developed by private companies acting under government regulation. They include land and submarine cables and radio links, as well as satellite links, via the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean satellites, from an earth satellite station in Hong Kong.

The expanding economy and population also led to rapid increases in the demand for electricity. It is not surprising either that, as resources became more plentiful, the provision of social and educational facilities - schools, colleges, hospitals and clinics – began to make major and growing calls on the government's capital works budget from the sixties onwards.

The New Towns Programme

Until the early 1970s, large-scale development in Hong Kong was mainly confined to the urban areas stretching around the harbour and back to the Kowloon foothills. The only exception was up the west coast to Kwai Chung, where the new container port was being built, and further on to the growing industrial centre of Tsuen Wan and its neighbouring Tsing Yi Island. Although this area was, in many respects, an extension of the urban area - and was later to be joined to it by an MTR line – it has continued to be administered as part of the New Territories. Beyond it and to the east, the rest of the New Territories remained largely rural, with village settlements and a few small market townships, such as Sha Tin, Tai Po, Fanling, Yuen Long and Castle Peak.

These rural settlements, together with Tsuen Wan, were in the seventies and eighties to become the nodal points of an ambitious programme of new town development. Started in 1972, this was to transform the face of the New Territories in little more than a decade. The impetus was the decision to undertake a much more ambitious housing programme, with the aim of providing adequate housing for the whole community at affordable prices.

It was estimated at the time that this would require the building of new housing for 1.8 million people but, because of population growth, the gradual raising of standards and the need to replace sub-standard housing, this has since proved to be an underestimate. Now, 15 years after the programme was announced, the target of housing 1.8 million people has been met, but there is still some way to go before the whole community is adequately housed at current standards.

Since the mid-seventies, more than a half of all government capital expenditure has been spent on the New Towns programme. This has involved much more than the building of public housing. In the first place, land has had to be formed, much of it by filling in seabed with material obtained by cutting away hillsides, often creating platforms for additional development. This has been necessary because most of Hong Kong's land area consists of