Splendid Hong Kong

“Hong Kong, squeezed between giant antagonists crunching huge bones of contention, has achieved within its own narrow territories a coexistence which is baffling, infuriating, incomprehensible, and which works splendidly — on borrowed time in a borrowed place.’

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Hong Kong’s social life, especially as it has evolved over the past three decades, is endlessly fascinating. Consider the place: almost six million people crowded onto about 410 square miles; not all of it habitable. Parts of Kowloon are probably the most densely populated human habitats in the world, with close to 400,000 inhabitants per square mile. To say the streets team with people is to understate the situation. The island of Hong Kong is almost as densely populated. So many millions of people crowded together in what sometimes appears as ordered chaos constitute the human basis of Hong Kong, and they interact for the most part cooperatively and productively. Whatever may happen after 1997, the great majority of these people — fatalistic, realistic, preoccupied and ambitious — carry on in the Hong Kong tradition: working hard, building, gambling, eating, enjoying, enduring the actualities and exploiting the possibilities around them.