nd of World War II, China was represented by the Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-Shek, and China had entered the allied camp during the war. The primary result of this was that Chine for the first time felt she was an equal among the powers. The allies, and especially the United States, humored this sense of quality to keep up China's morale. The allies needed China to tie down the Japanese while they were engaged in a life and death struggle against their enemies in Europe, and as a result the U.S. and Great Britain agreed to the final abolition of extraterritoriality in China early in 1943. China at the time was resentful of Britain's rapid defeat in the face of the Japanese in Asia and her weak performance in Europe. China was not happy with the abolition of British extraterritoriality alone and wanted the return of the New Territories, probably as the first step leading to the eventual retrocession of Hong Kong. The British alleviated this problem by becoming more successful in the European theater by 1943. The question of the retrocession of Hong Kong had not disappeared, but with the revival of civil war in China, the KMT did not have the force to regain the territories, and the communists, who did have the power, would not claim it (Kit-Ching, 1990, 17).
Hong Kong has one of the highest population densities in the world 5,412 persons per square kilometer (or 14,005 per square mile). About 98% of the population of 5,812,000 (1990 est.) are Chinese, and most have their family origins in Kwangtung province. The population also contains some 60,000 Europeans and Americans, 57,000 Filipinos (mostly domestic servants), and 30,000 Indians and Pakistanis. In 1990 there were also more than 55,000 Vietnamese refugees confined in camps and awaiting either resettlement overseas or repatriation to Vietnam. About 50,000 Hong Kong residents emigrate each year, mostly to North America or Australia, either because they are...