HONG Kong's population last year showed its biggest yearly leap since the 1970s immigration wave, leading to a warning that with more than six million living here the Government might have to speed up its programme to release land for housing.
Census and Statistics Department figures show that 117,800 more people crammed into Hong Kong last year, raising the population to 6,019,900.
Births accounted for only 35 per cent of the increase, with people arriving from outside taking over as the main factor in population growth for the first time in 15 years.
Emigrant Hong Kong people returning home and an influx of people working on the huge airport and railway projects tipped the balance, said demographer Ronald Skeldon of Hong Kong University.
Dr Anthony Yeh Gar-on, of the university's Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, was alarmed.
He said the Government might need to revise its territorial planning strategy, which was based on a conservative estimate of 6.47 million people crowding into the territory by 2011.
At last year's two per cent growth rate, that figure would be passed by 2000 - and that did not allow for the extra 10,000 mainlanders expected to arrive from this year, nor the influx that might follow 1997.
