Celestial Empire, which had been weakened by internal rebellion. Japan
defeated China in the 1894-95 war and exerted ever-stronger commercial
control over the mainland. Russia made its bid by advancing through
Manchuria and occupying Port Arthur. Germany hastened to join the
commercial invaders. Hacked at from four directions, the Chinese people
attempted to close ranks in defense of their homeland.
The United States, with no apparent desire to annex Chinese territory,
nevertheless heightened both British and Chinese apprehension by
launching its naval attack on Manila from Mirs Bay in May, 1898. The
Chinese feared another land grab, and the British felt they could best
protect Hong Kong if they were able to deal with a strong, unified China.
Despite its earlier reluctance to disturb the status quo, Great Britain
was now convinced that it had to acquire the territory between Kowloon
and the Sham Chun River as a protective buffer for Hong Kong. On July 1,
1898, Britain obtained a 99-year lease to this mainland territory and 235
adjacent islands with a total land area of 365½ square miles.
Chinese guerrilla forces in the New Territories—as this leased area is
still called—opposed the British occupation but were defeated and driven
out by British troops in a ten-day campaign. That was the easiest part
of it. It took four years of wrangling with the uncooperative Chinese
residents to establish valid titles to private plots of land in the New
Territories. Kowloon City, an eight-acre patch on the border of Kowloon
and the New Territories, became a kind of orphan in the transaction,
with the British firmly insisting it was part of the lease and the
Chinese arguing somewhat inconclusively that it was not. Nationalist
China claimed it as recently as 1948, but Red China has not so far pushed
a similar claim. Britain regarded it as hers in 1960, and sent in her
police to clean out the robbers and murderers who had long used it as a
hiding place.
A general deterioration of Sino-British relations followed the leasing of
the New Territories. The two empires were at odds over the maintenance of
Chinese customs stations in the New Territories, the presence of Chinese
warships in Kowloon Bay and the treatment of Chinese prisoners in Hong
Kong jails. Moreover, each disagreement was intensified by the patriotic
fervor which led to the Boxer Rebellion.
At the opening of the twentieth century, the Chinese Empire had been
driven into a hopeless position. Bound and crippled like the feet of her
women, she had neither the weapons nor the industrial capacity to repel
the encroaching armies of Europe and Japan. By any reasonable standard,
she was beaten before she started to fight back.
Out of China’s desperation grew a super-patriotic secret society, The
Fist of Righteous Harmony, or Boxers, who claimed that magical powers
sustained their cause, making them invulnerable to the superior weapons
of foreigners. Occult arts and a rigorous program of physical training,
the Boxers professed, would carry them to victory. It was a crusade of
absurdity; foolish and foredoomed, but plainly preferable to unresisting
surrender.
The Boxers opened their offensive by murdering missionaries and Chinese
Christians, causing a new rush of refugees to Hong Kong. They burned
foreign legations in Peking and sent the surviving Chinese Christians and
foreigners fleeing to the British legation for safety. An international
army, composed of French, German, Russian, American and Japanese units,
lifted the siege of the legation on August 14, 1900, and remained in
Peking until peace was signed eleven months later.
Recurrences of plague killed 7,962 persons in the colony at the turn of
the century, but the discovery that plague was borne by rats prompted
a war to exterminate them. Rewards of a few cents were paid for their
carcasses, and profit-hungry Chinese were suspected of importing
rats from Canton to claim the bounty. The threat of plague gradually
decreased, but malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cholera remained to
ravage the refugee-jammed colony.
On September 18, 1906, a two-hour-long typhoon hit the colony without
warning, drowning fifteen Europeans and from 5,000 to 10,000 Chinese. No
one could accurately estimate the deaths, which were concentrated among
the fishermen and boat people, but nearly 2,500 Chinese boats of all
types were hammered into kindling wood or sunk without trace. Fifty-nine
European ships were badly damaged and a French destroyer broke in two.
Piers and sea walls were breached and undermined, and 190 houses were
blown down or rendered uninhabitable. Roads and telephone lines were
washed out, farm crops and tree plantations were laid low by the power of
the worst storm in local history. Damage estimates ranged far into the
millions.
In the aftermath of the typhoon, all elements of the population
cooperated to raise a relief fund. The money collected was used to repair
wrecked boats, recover and bury the dead, feed and house the homeless and
provide for the widows and orphans of storm victims. (The horror of this
catastrophe was reenacted on September 2, 1937, when a typhoon and tidal
wave engulfed a New Territories fishing village, drowning thousands.)
The dawn of the twentieth century marked the final collapse of the
Celestial Empire. Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who had been banished from Hong Kong
in 1896 for plotting against the Chinese government, steadily intensified
his revolutionary activities until, in 1911, he led the revolution which
overthrew the tottering monarchy and replaced it with the Republic of
China. The unrest that accompanied this violent change-over caused more
than 50,000 refugees to cross the Chinese border into British territory.
The transition from empire to republic did not end China’s internal
turmoil, and for many years afterward its political disturbances were
felt in Hong Kong. Piracy flourished in the waters around the colony;
one band of corsairs set fire to a steamship, causing the deaths of 300
passengers. Brigands and warlords preyed on southern China, sometimes
making forays across the colony’s border to pounce on villages in the New
Territories. China was torn by political struggles during the 1920s, and
these provoked strikes within the colony and Chinese boycotts of Hong
Kong goods. All through this period, refugees poured across the border in
unending lines.
The worldwide depression of the 1930s brought a sharp drop in colony
trade, but the government created jobs for thousands with road-building
and other public works.
Japan opened its war against China in 1937, and within a year Hong
Kong was bursting with the addition of 600,000 refugees. Poverty and
overcrowded housing offered ideal conditions for epidemics of smallpox
and beriberi which killed 4,500 persons in 1938. Still, the total
population climbed to 1,600,000. Government refugee camps housed about
5,000 people; another 27,000 regularly slept in the streets.
Emboldened by victories in China and an alliance with Nazi Germany, the
Japanese militarists launched their “Greater Far Eastern Co-Prosperity
Sphere” by attacking Hong Kong, Pearl Harbor and the Philippines on
December 7-8, 1941. Crossing the Chinese border at Lo Wu in the New
Territories, two Japanese divisions supported by overwhelming air power
invaded and conquered the colony within three weeks. They proceeded
without pause to loot its warehouses and strip its factories of machinery
for shipment to Japan.
The Japanese imprisoned the remaining British residents and raped and
pillaged at will. By torture, starvation, and main force they drove a
million Chinese residents from the colony and maintained a merciless
control over the survivors by propaganda, intimidation, imprisonment and
the use of Chinese fifth-columnists.
With their smashing victories in the Philippines, East Indies and at
Singapore, the Japanese should have found it comparatively easy to unite
Asiatics against the whites who had once lorded it over them. But they
suffered from the same compulsion as the Germans; at a time when they
had a chance to win allies among the people they had conquered, they
botched it by senseless cruelties. When their firecracker-like string of
victories had burned out, they had gained no friends, but instead had
earned millions of new enemies.
Nearly four years passed before the Japanese were beaten into
unconditional surrender and the British rulers returned to Hong Kong.
Their return had a kind of spectral quality as the British Pacific Fleet,
commanded by Rear Admiral C. H. J. Harcourt, steamed through Lei Yue Mun
pass, gliding under the silent muzzles of Japanese guns emplaced along
the mountainsides with their crews standing at attention beside them.
This was on August 30, 1945. The British went ashore to find thousands
of their countrymen and other Allied prisoners gaunt and starving in
prison camps. Many had been crippled and deformed by torture. Others
had been killed in Allied bombing raids on Hong Kong. Seven large and
seventy-two small ships had been sunk in the harbor, 27,000 homes had
been destroyed. The fishing fleet was in ruins and the fishermen were in
rags. Nine-tenths of the surviving residents were dead broke, while a few
collaborators and black-marketers had accumulated fortunes. Livestock
had virtually disappeared. Millions of carefully cultivated trees,
planted to check erosion and retain the run-off of tropical rainfall for
drainage into the reservoirs, had been chopped down to provide firewood.
Schools were almost entirely suspended. Railroads and ferry lines were
in an advanced stage of disrepair. Disease and crime had reached their
highest rates in many years.
The British, who are inclined to procrastinate in the solution of small
crises, can be indomitable in the face of major emergencies. Within six
months after reoccupying the colony they had restored its government and
society to working order. Six years after the British return, the colony
was more prosperous, more congested, and more progressive than it had
ever been before.
Nationalist China was driven from the mainland in 1949, and a new
Communist state took its place. Britain promptly recognized Red China
as the ruling power on the mainland, but relations between the Chinese
Reds and Hong Kong were strained by Communist-caused disturbances in
the colony and shooting “incidents” at sea and in the air. There was no
apparent danger of war, however. In 1951, the colony’s trade amounted to
$1,550,000,000, the highest point it had ever reached.
If there were signs of complacency in Hong Kong, they were erased by
the outbreak of the Korean war. The United Nations clamped immediate
restrictions on the colony’s trade with Red China, and Red China slashed
its imports from Hong Kong. Trade volume declined still further when Hong
Kong voluntarily halted its exports to Korea and the sending of strategic
materials to Red China. The United States at first included Hong Kong in
its embargo of all trade with Red China, but the colony prevailed upon
America to ease the ban. America agreed to accept goods from Hong Kong,
provided that they were accompanied by a Certificate of Origin attesting
that they were made in Hong Kong and had not simply been transshipped
from Communist China through the colony.
With the China market gone, as well as Hong Kong’s traditional role
as a transshipper to and from China, the colony executed its most
spectacular economic somersault since 1841; it switched from trading
to manufacturing. In six years, the great entrepôt became an important
industrial producer. By 1962, over 70 percent of the goods it exported
were made in the colony, and about half its workers were employed in
industry.
Having performed this overnight flip-flop without suffering an economic
set-back, Hong Kong has become more prosperous than ever. Except that it
has too many people, hasn’t enough land to stand on, can’t raise enough
food or store enough water, is incessantly harried by rising tariffs and
shipping costs, and has no idea what its testy, gigantic neighbor to the
north will do next, Hong Kong would appear not to have a worry in the
world.
CHAPTER TWO
An Avalanche from the North
“When one reads of 1,000,000 homeless exiles all human
compassion baulks and the great sum of human tragedy becomes a
matter of statistical examination.”—“A PROBLEM OF PEOPLE,” Hong
Kong Annual Report, 1956
From the end of World War II until the fall of 1949 the mainland of
China rumbled with the clash of contending armies. Thousands of Chinese,
uprooted and dispossessed by the Nationalist-Communist struggle, streamed
southward across the Hong Kong border in a steady procession.
The orderly nature of the exodus ended when Mao Tse-tung, having beaten
and dispersed the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, turned his
guns on all people suspected of thinking or acting against the People’s
Republic of China. What had been a slow withdrawal became a headlong
flight for life.
For six months after the Reds took over the mainland, Hong Kong clung
to its free-immigration policy. Then it reluctantly adopted a formula of
“one in, one out”—accepting one immigrant if another person returned to
China. But the refugee flow continued at a reduced rate in spite of land
and sea patrols on both sides of the international boundary.
In 1956, the British relaxed immigration rules for seven months, hoping
the refugees would go home. Instead, 56,000 new refugees arrived from
China, and the colony reimposed its restrictions.
The Chinese side of the frontier unexpectedly opened in May, 1962, and
70,000 refugees dashed for Hong Kong. The colony, alarmed and already
desperately overcrowded, strengthened and extended its boundary fence and
returned all but 10,000 of the new arrivals to China.
This race for freedom aroused the Free World’s tardy compassion. The
United States moved to admit 6,000 Hong Kong refugees, including some who
had applied for admission as long ago as 1954. Taiwan, Brazil, and Canada
also expressed willingness to accept a limited number. Until this change
of heart, Taiwan had taken only 15,000 colony refugees, and the United
States only 105 a year. None of these offers will materially reduce the
number of Hong Kong refugees, whose total is officially estimated at
1,000,000. Unofficial estimates set the total around 1,500,000.
Whatever the total within this range, it stuns the imagination. The
well-intentioned observer who has come to sympathize finds himself
backing away from this amorphous mass, unable to isolate or grasp its
human content of individual misery, privation and heartache. He wants to
help, as he would do if he saw a child struck down in the road, but when
the whole landscape is a panorama of tragedy, he hardly knows where to
begin.
There are a dozen landscapes like that in Hong Kong; the hills of Upper
Kowloon with thousands of flimsy shacks perched uncertainly on their
steep granite faces; the heights above Causeway Bay where squatter
settlements flow down the mountainside like a glacier of rubbish; the
rooftops of Wanchai, maggoty with close-packed sheds; the rotting
tenements of the Central District strewn in terraces of misery across
the lower slopes of Victoria Peak; the sink-hole of the old Walled City
in Kowloon with its open sewers and such dark, narrow alleys that its
inhabitants seem to be groping around in a cave with a few holes punched
through the roof.
Yet there are people in the colony who have chosen to cut their way
through this thick tangle of indiscriminate suffering. Going beyond
that first fragile desire to help and the secondary conclusion that no
one person can do anything effective against a problem of such vast
dimensions, they have learned to stand in the path of an avalanche and
direct traffic. They have opened a way to solve the refugee problem by
the simple process of starting somewhere. Ultimate solutions, in the
sense of housing and feeding all the refugees by giving them productive
jobs in a free economy, lie many years and millions of dollars away.
Meanwhile, people of courage and resolution, dealing with individual
human needs instead of wallowing in statistics, have achieved wonders in
improving the lot of Hong Kong’s refugees. Who they are and what they
have done offer the real key to Hong Kong’s problem of people.
Sister Annie Margareth Skau, a Norwegian missionary nurse of towering
physical and spiritual stature, began her work among Hong Kong’s refugees
with invaluable postgraduate training. She herself was a refugee from
China, driven out by the Reds.
Born in Oslo, she studied nursing at its City Hospital and decided
to become a “personal Christian,” dedicating her life to labor as a
missionary nurse of the Covenanters, or Mission Covenant Church of
Norway. The work was certain to be arduous, for the Covenanters sent
their workers to such remote corners of the world as Lapland, the Congo
or the interior of China. Annie, who has an almost mystical intensity of
religious faith, had no qualms about her probable assignments. Besides,
she looked about as large and indestructible as Michelangelo’s Moses, and
possessed a temperament of ebullient good nature.
After serving successfully in several other missions, she was sent to
China in the late 1930s. Establishing herself at a mission in Shensi,
northeastern China, she was the only Western-trained medical worker among
the 2,000,000 residents of this agricultural region. In all likelihood,
she was the largest woman ever seen by the Chinese children under her
care—over six feet, four inches tall, with a Valkyrie’s frame—but
so gentle that none of the children were awed by her presence. Her
appearance anywhere was a signal for laughter and games; she never seemed
too tired to play with children and teach them little songs.
Invading Japanese armies passed within two miles of her mission and
clinic in 1938, but none of the villagers ever betrayed the foreigner’s
presence. She had a quick, retentive mind, and learned to speak Mandarin
Chinese almost as well as she knew her own language. On the rare
occasions when an English-speaking visitor reached the out-of-the-way
settlement, he was surprised to find Sister Annie speaking his language
quite capably. Throughout the war and into the postwar era, she continued
to bring Christianity and expert medical care to her adopted people.
When the Communists seized control of China, however, the Christian
missionaries were doomed. The Christian God became a hateful image in
a shrine reserved for Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, and a beloved
missionary nurse in a farming village was transformed into an enemy of
the people. The commissars and their lackeys began by hedging Annie
about with arbitrary regulations, then they confiscated medical supplies
intended for her patients.
None of these measures succeeded in halting her work. Exasperated at
their failure, the local party leaders finally dragged her before
a kangaroo-style People’s Court. The word had been passed that any
villager who arose to denounce her for crimes against the state would
be handsomely rewarded. Not a single accuser appeared. Having lost face
before the entire village, the Reds were more determined than ever to
punish her.
If no one who knew Sister Annie could be lured into a denunciation of
her, the obvious solution was to haul her off to a distant village where
no one knew her. Having done this, the Reds threw her into jail as an
object-lesson to anyone who befriended Christians. An old woman, knowing
nothing of Annie but remembering the humane work of other missionary
nurses in the village, begged the Communists to put her in jail with the
foreign prisoner so that she could comfort her.
“Even the guards were kind to me,” Annie recalls. “The village people
didn’t jeer at me or try to hurt me; they kept trying to pass food to me.
They were loyal to the last minute!”
Under the relentless persecution and mistreatment, Annie’s strong body
broke down, and in the summer of 1951, she was close to death from
pneumonia and malaria. The Reds, who refused to let her leave the country
when she was well, hurried to get rid of the ailing woman. Exhausted and
gravely ill, she left China and returned to Norway for a long rest and
the slow regaining of her normal health.
Eighteen months later she came back to Asia knowing that she would never
be readmitted to a Communist China. But there was still work to be done,
and she turned her efforts to a squalid shacktown in Hong Kong called
Rennie’s Mill Camp.
Three years earlier the routed remnants of Chiang’s army, left behind
on the mainland, had thrown together a cluster of shacks beside Junk
Bay, a backwater of the British colony without roads, water, light or
sanitation. Nearly 8,000 persons, wounded soldiers and their wives and
children, camped haphazardly on the steep shores of the bay, ran up the
Nationalist flag and claimed the forlorn site as their own.
When Annie reached the camp in March, 1953, traveling by sampan and
clambering over the high hills like a lost Viking, she found it haunted
by despair; a dirty, disease-ridden place, dragged down by the decline
of the Nationalist cause. Another nurse had started a small clinic in a
wooden hut, eight by ten feet in floor area, which treated 600 patients
a day. Annie and the other nurse shared sleeping quarters in a cubicle
attached to the hut.
Sometimes the cases were so numerous and critical that the two nurses put
the worst cases in their own cramped beds and spent the night on their
feet treating other patients. Their medical equipment consisted of one
thermometer, a few antiseptics and dressings, and a rickety table that
wobbled groggily on the half-decayed floorboards.
With the approach of Christmas, 1953, the fortunes of the clinic sank
to a new low. Both nurses were quite broke, unable to buy the food and
medical supplies their patients needed so critically. Acting more from
faith than reason, Annie set out to pick her way over the precipitous
rocks to Lei Yue Mun pass and cross by sampan to Hong Kong Island, hoping
to beg for help.
To her delighted surprise, the mission’s post-office box on the island
produced a windfall—$200 in contributions from ten persons overseas.
Charging into the shopping crowds, Annie spent every cent on food and
medicine. She scarcely noticed the weight of her purchases as she trekked
the hard route back to Rennie’s Mill. Until three o’clock Christmas
morning, the two nurses were on their feet, handing out life-saving
presents and exchanging holiday greetings in Mandarin and Cantonese.
“The money problems weren’t so bad after that,” Annie says. “Gifts came
in from welfare organizations and individuals, and we were able to build
a little stone clinic and a home for ourselves.”
At the same time, health problems grew worse at Rennie’s Mill. Drug
addiction and tuberculosis spread through the camp as its inhabitants
abandoned hope of an early return to China.
“Bad housing and poor food started the TB,” she explains. “But it got
much worse when people gave up hope, or heard about their relatives
being killed by the Communists. Chinese people are devoted to their
parents, and to be separated from them, or learn they’ve been killed—it’s
heartbreaking.
“That was when we realized we’d have to build a rest home for those
patients,” Annie says. “We didn’t have any money; all we had was a
mission to do the best we could. One day I boarded a sampan with a group
of children and we rowed out into Junk Bay until we came to a little
inlet. I saw a hill just above us, jutting right out to the shore. I knew
right then we would build our chapel on that hill.”
Annie discusses the incident with the fervor and conviction of one who
has received a private revelation.
“I saw the whole rest-center arranged around that chapel almost as if
it were already completed, built around love. I had no idea where the
money was coming from, not any kind of an architect’s plan, but it didn’t
matter. I knew that Christ would find a way.”