Send us Hong Kong overflow'

REFUGEES WELCOME ON FORMOSA
CHURCH authorities in Formosa who are wholeheartedly behind the government's offer to accept from Hong Kong as many refugees as care to go there, ordered a special day of prayer on Pentecost Sunday and a special collection for the Bishops Fund for refugee relief.
Vice President and Premier Chen Cheng announced last month that "as an emergency relief measure, the Chinese Government has decided to contribute 1,000 tons of rice to the Hong Kong government to help feed these refugees."
The government has gone ahead with preparations to receive the refugees. A temporary refugee relay centre is being set up at the southern port city of Kaohsiung.
Vice-President Chen Cheng pointed out that last year Formosa. had a surplus of 200.000 tons of rice and that 150,000 tons would he sufficient to feed a million refugees for one year.
The Minister of Interior has stated that 30.000 refugees could be absorbed in the underdeveloped eastern and southern parts of the island. The local governments of the counties of Hualien, Taitung and Pintung have offered tracts of anreclaimed land. Most of the refugees are farmers.
Giving weight to the government's confidence that large numbers of refugees can be absorbed. a leading official of the U.S. Agency for International Development said recently that Formosa could absorb from 100.000 to 200,000 refugees without the economy being affected.
The Free China Relief Association has taken 71.268 refugees to Formosa during the past eleven years. All have been resettled and are now supporting themselves. Also, over 100.000 Chinese have reached Formosa during the last ten years without the assistance of F.C.R.A. and have apparently been absorbed. (The mass exodus from mainland China to Formosa
of some two million people occurred before the end of 1950.)
• Meanwhile Hong Kong's registration department is busy turning immigrants, legal and illegal, into .citizens of the colony at the rate of about 35.000 a month. Offices in Hong Kong and Kowloon are each documenting 600 new arrivals a day, although the legal intake is only 50.