Hong Kong variety show: The mastermind behind the scenes is emerging.

The registration process in Kowloon Walled City lasted for three days.

On the first day, a group of wanted criminals were apprehended. On the second day, more than a dozen people who tried to use false identities to slip through were screened out. By noon on the third day, the loudspeaker above the Longjin Road registration point finally changed its message: "All registration points will be officially closed at 5 pm today. Residents who have not yet registered are requested to go as soon as possible."

His tone remained gentle, but everyone could tell that this was an ultimatum.

During these three harrowing days, the entire joint task force persevered to the limit. The heavy metal barricades and yellow and black caution tape surrounding the Walled City were never removed. Every morning at six o'clock, the three registration points on Junction Road, Tung Tau Tsuen Road, and Ka Ping Tat Road were brightly lit until ten o'clock at night, when the last batch of Housing Department staff finally packed up and checked the accounts.

The uniformed police officers were working three shifts a day at an extremely high intensity. When they finished their shifts, the officers didn't even have time to go home. Instead, they would take off their gun holsters and go straight to the bus next to Jiabingda Road Park to rest in their uniforms.

On the third day at noon, Li Shutang stood next to the command vehicle, finished flipping through the last page of the operation summary report, closed the folder, and handed it to the adjutant next to him.

In three days, a total of 47 wanted criminals and fugitives were apprehended. No police officers were killed in the line of duty, there were no riots among residents, and no incidents requiring police intervention occurred.

"Thank you for your hard work. Please organize and archive the report."

"yes!"

Li Shutang knew, of course, that some missing people wouldn't appear in any reports, but that wasn't his concern. He didn't concern himself with or want to know what the distillery was doing.

Lu Chen had told him that some nails in the walled city couldn't be knocked off with a hammer and required other tools. As the Commissioner of Police of Hong Kong Island, he generally had reservations about this; however, from the perspective of the millions of people in Hong Kong, he chose to pretend he didn't see it.

With the registration period ending, Housing Department statistics were also placed on Wilson's desk: more than 33,400 households, totaling more than 49,300 people, completed the registration.

This figure is nearly 10% higher than the estimate, resulting in a population density of approximately 1.9 million people per square kilometer, which is more than 100 times the average density of Hong Kong Island, making it the most densely populated human settlement in human history.

Among the extra people, some were unregistered individuals who had never existed in any official records; some were casual laborers who had been sublet three times by the previous tenants and whose names were unknown even to the landlords; and some were people who had been smuggled into the city from the mainland and Southeast Asia and had lived in the walled city for more than ten years, married and had children, but whose only identity document was a yellowed red birth certificate.

Faced with this thorny list, Wei Yixin pondered for a long time before finally writing down his instructions: "All those registered shall be included in the resettlement program."

……

The relocation officially began on October 10th.

The Hong Kong government had long ago designated large resettlement areas in newly built public housing estates in Kowloon Bay, Kwun Tong, and Wong Tai Sin. However, due to the number of people far exceeding expectations, in addition to the public housing allocated by the government, real estate companies such as Golden Harvest Properties and Wharf Holdings also offered low-cost apartments and tenement buildings in areas such as Sham Shui Po, Cheung Sha Wan, and Wong Tai Sin, and resold them to the government at below-market cost prices as supplementary resettlement housing.

The Housing Authority prioritizes placing elderly people and families with children in these buildings during the allocation process—at least they won't be crammed into remote industrial areas, and it will be convenient for them to buy groceries and go to school.

On the first day of the relocation, Housing Department staff posted densely packed lists of tens of thousands of people to be allocated on the bulletin boards of every tenement building in advance, and also arranged for someone to help answer questions next to the bulletin boards.

Forty double-decker citybuses, urgently dispatched by Kowloon Motor Bus (KMB), roared into action at 6:00 a.m., forming a convoy that stretched from Lung Chun Road intersection to the corner of Junction Road. As soon as one bus was full, the next one immediately took its place, filling the gap perfectly.

The residents of the walled city, carrying their own belongings, filed out of the narrow and crowded arcade buildings like a tide.

Some people worked together to carry an extremely heavy 14-inch Lesheng brand black and white television; some carefully protected the thrushes hanging in the wire cage; and there was an old man who had survived most of his life in the walled city, whose only possessions were two plastic bags—one containing old clothes to keep warm, and the other containing chipped bowls and chopsticks.

Of course, some people refused to leave. For example, at the cement block at the Longjin Road intersection, an elderly woman with wrinkled skin and white hair tightly hugged an old leather suitcase with peeling paint and refused to board the bus no matter what.

Her only son was discovered to be a wanted criminal on the first day of registration. Before being led away in handcuffs, he hysterically shouted across the crowd, "Mom! Don't wait for me! Go to the new house first!"

The old lady didn't leave. For the past three days, she has been holding onto the suitcase and guarding the same spot every day.

Housing Authority staff took turns trying to dissuade her three times, but all attempts failed. Finally, Aunt Zhang, a familiar neighbor, came forward with tears in her eyes, knelt down, and gently took her withered hand, saying softly, "Sister, when your child comes to find you in the future, it will be much easier to find him in a new house than in this ditch."

The old lady's cloudy eyes flickered slightly. She tightened her grip on the suitcase in her arms, and finally stood up shakily. With the help of her neighbors, she stepped onto the bus.

The long line of Kowloon Motor Buses drove away from Lung Chun Road one after another.

The atmosphere inside the carriage was somber. Passengers rarely spoke, instead pressing their faces against the windows and gazing at the massive gray structure behind them, which was gradually shrinking in the morning mist.

Some are born here and linger here for forty years, never venturing beyond the three streets of the walled city in their entire lives; others, on their very first night after smuggling themselves ashore, plunge into this dark labyrinth, spending the rest of their lives hiding in the sunless stairwells.

Now, that dark city they helplessly call "home" is shrinking further and further in the rearview mirror, eventually becoming an insignificant gray silhouette on the windshield, disappearing completely from sight as the convoy turns.

Of course, housing is only the first problem to be faced in the demolition and relocation process. In addition, there is another very serious problem that needs to be solved - that is, the employment problem of the residents of the walled city.

Within the more than 30,000 households of the walled city, there were once nearly 2,000 unlicensed shops and underground workshops, forming a self-contained underground ecosystem: unlicensed dental clinics, black market food processing plants, unlicensed herbal medicine shops, alleyway barbershops, underground cooked food stalls...

These business owners have genuine skills, genuine products, and genuine customers, but there's one thing that's fake—their licenses.

Some professions are impossible to license outside of Hong Kong, such as dentistry. Most dentists in the Kowloon Walled City were either trained through apprenticeship or graduated from medical schools in mainland China, and therefore could not obtain a license to practice in Hong Kong. However, they charged ten dollars for each tooth extraction, ten times cheaper than regular clinics in Hong Kong, and their skills were excellent.

There were also the food vendors lurking in the dark alleys, using makeshift earthen stoves and secondhand freezers. Their prices were cheap, and they once supported half of the breakfast stalls in the neighborhood. However, their hygiene was appalling, and they couldn't obtain business licenses. In addition, they couldn't afford the rent, so they couldn't continue operating after leaving.

For them, relocation is not just about moving to a different place, but also about completely losing their source of income.

Similar dilemmas exist in more than a dozen gray industries, such as small food processing, dismantling of waste electrical appliances, and assembly of counterfeit watches—it's not that they don't want to move, but that they can't survive after moving out.

Fortunately, Lu Chen had planned ahead. Several months earlier, he had joined forces with several prominent Chinese businessmen and social figures in Hong Kong to submit a detailed special proposal to the Governor's House.

The proposal is concise and to the point, containing no more than three core points:

I. Transformation subsidies are precisely formulated according to industry, and reasonable guidance is provided for career transition;

Second, owners and tenants who do not meet the conditions for demobilization can receive a one-time cash compensation in accordance with the compensation standards for ordinary households;

Third, those who maliciously resist relocation and attempt to hijack the overall interests will be forcibly evicted in accordance with the law.

The first two are steps to be taken for the vast majority of people at the bottom; while the last one is a red line drawn for a very small number of greedy people.

Therefore, on October 12th, the specific compensation and relocation subsidy standards were also distributed to each registration point and resettlement area.

The implementation standards are much more detailed than the initial plan—unlicensed dentists can apply for retraining subsidies with proof of long-term residence in the walled city, choosing to work as dental assistants in registered clinics or switch to denture processing technology; food processing workshop owners can apply for micro-enterprise start-up loans with equipment lists and production records to re-establish legal processing plants outside the walled city; the waste recycling and electrical appliance dismantling industries will be coordinated and resettled by the Environmental Protection Administration, incorporating eligible practitioners into the contract worker sequence of the municipal waste recycling system…

Of course, even though the plan was very comprehensive, there were still some people who didn't want to leave—to be precise, some people wanted to take advantage of the fact that everyone had agreed to move out to raise their share of compensation.

It's understandable. After all, holdouts are a common sight in any demolition project, and the demolition of Kowloon Walled City was no exception.

……

There is a five-story tenement building near Longjin Road in the East District. The owner, surnamed Kuang, is in his sixties. He owns a building in the Walled City and can be considered a small property owner in the Walled City.

On the first day of registration, this person was the most enthusiastic and proactive. However, as his neighbors packed up and moved out one after another, and the entire building was about to be vacant, he unexpectedly turned against them.

Mr. Kwong boasted that his tenement building was located on a prime street, with excellent location and extremely stable rental income, and that the compensation offered by the Hong Kong government was practically robbery. He demanded a 50% increase on the existing compensation base, otherwise he would not sign.

To create a stir, he clung to an empty ground-floor shop under his name and even hired seven or eight heavily tattooed gangsters to block the door with sticks.

The Housing Department's negotiation team went three times, and each time they were driven out by Old Kwong and his thugs who slammed tables and smashed chairs. The third time, a young female employee who had been with the company for less than two years went, and the other party tore the compensation plan in half and threw it on the ground in front of her.

The female employee was extremely aggrieved. After returning to her temporary office, she sorted through the documents with red eyes and finally couldn't help but bury her face in her desk and burst into tears.

Just then, Senior Inspector Lee Man-bun pushed open the door and took in the whole scene.

He said nothing, turned around and left the office.

That afternoon, Li Wenbin, dressed in riot police uniform, personally led a line of heavily armed "blue hats" to the entrance of the tenement building on Longjin Road.

No one has recorded the specifics of how it was done; only three sentences have been passed down: the baton was wielded with force, the foot was raised with height, and the hand was swung with accuracy.

Since that day, no holdout households have appeared in the walled city.