assortment of private organizations attempting to deal with them, there
is an absolute necessity for a central clearinghouse to eliminate
overlapping in some areas and neglect in others. This is the function
of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, a coordinating agency of
ninety welfare organizations which regularly checks the balance sheets of
its affiliates. If they pass muster, the colony government grants them
substantial aid to supplement their own resources.
The Council, under its executive secretary Madge Newcombe, is also
charged with discovering where and what the needs of poor people are, and
then of assigning the religious or welfare societies best equipped to
satisfy them. There is no shortage of needs; the Council’s concern is to
avoid imbalance and wasted effort in meeting them.
Five years ago the Council created the Central Relief Records Office.
With its file of approximately 200,000 cards, listing the name of every
relief client and the aid he is receiving from each agency, the office
has drastically reduced the duplication of welfare-agency work and
chiseling by potential recipients. There is no need for begging; relief
is so well organized that any hungry person can get a meal at a welfare
agency.
Apart from feeding and housing the colony’s displaced persons, there is
a human problem of especial poignance. A resettlement estate, at its
outset, is an assembly of strangers from all over China, some from big
cities, some from back-country hamlets, tossed together like beans in a
bowl.
At Wong Tai Sin, one of the largest resettlement estates, 60,000 people
are packed into long rows of multi-story concrete blocks. Physically,
they are far better off than they were in the shacktowns they came
from, but when they first moved in they were strangers lost in a crowd,
rootless and with no sense of community interests.
During World Refugee Year (1959-60), the United States government met
the problem of building community consciousness at Wong Tai Sin with one
of its most effective gifts—$210,000 to build a community center there.
Now completed and in full operation, it is a large, modern, five-story
building teeming with community enterprises.
The variety of its activities is bewildering: classes for the deaf,
courses in Diesel mechanics and refrigeration engineering, Chinese opera,
day nurseries, social events, libraries, movies and a hundred other
interests—all of them designed to form a congenial community out of
thousands of isolated families.
The idea worked so well that the United Kingdom put up an equal amount
of money to build a second center in the new-born industrial city of
Tsuen Wan. The Toronto and Canadian World Refugee Year committees donated
$75,000 for a third community center at Chai Wan, on Hong Kong Island.
Others are planned, and the public response to the centers has been so
enthusiastic that the colony hopes to establish one in every resettlement
estate.
The Hong Kong branch of Church World Service, a department of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in America, picked up fresh
vigor a few years ago. Dr. Elbert E. Gates, Jr., pastor of the First
Baptist Church of Westfield, N.J., made an incidental stop at Hong Kong
during a trip to Australia. He and his wife, June, had a close-up look
at the colony’s refugees, and what they saw made an unforgettable
impression on them. In 1959, he gave up his pastorate and took a
one-third cut in salary to become director of the Church World Service
branch in Hong Kong.
Working together, the couple have become leaders in colony refugee
activities. The statistical side alone is enormous—distributing 53,000
quarts of powdered milk a day and 2,500,000 balanced-ration biscuits a
month, and operating a noodle factory and a central kitchen with a daily
capacity of 40,000 meals. There are scholarships for young people, dental
clinics, foundling homes, homes for orphaned girls and a dozen other
undertakings.
Dr. Gates, a cheerful, tireless advocate of the colony’s poor people,
interrupts his work many times to show overseas visitors what is being
done, and still needs to be done, to help the refugees. He takes most
pleasure, perhaps, in displaying the “self-help” projects of Church World
Service.
At one school in the hills of Kowloon, he directs a home where girls are
taught to make dresses, sweaters and ties for the American market. All
were formerly homeless, most are under twenty years old, some are blind,
others have only one hand or one arm. They have all learned to knit,
including the girl with one arm, and are earning their living by making
high-quality products for sale in the best stores.
“We don’t want to produce curios, or something that tries to play on
people’s sympathy by calling itself a refugee product,” Dr. Gates says.
“These girls have proved they can turn out goods that will hold their own
in a competitive market.”
It is obvious that Doctor and Mrs. Gates are enjoying themselves as much
as those they help when they drop into the Faith Hope Nursery, a joint
enterprise of Church World Service and the YWCA. The nursery children,
two to five years old, are shack-dwellers whose mothers work during the
day. At the nursery, the kids receive daytime care, meals, clothes and a
daily bath, with plenty of time left over for group singing and dancing.
When the pastor and his wife appear, moppet grins spread the width of the
classroom and there is a spirited exchange of Cantonese greetings.
Church World Service, together with CARE, Catholic Relief Services and
the Lutheran World Service, form the recognized “big four” of Hong Kong’s
private welfare organizations. Each one does its own work and cooperates
willingly with the other three, as well as scores of other Catholic,
Protestant and non-denominational groups. One hears a certain amount of
subdued muttering about this or that religious group pushing hard for new
members, but there is no sign that it has seriously impaired their aim,
which is to help all poor people without regard to finicky distinctions
of race or religion.
CARE, the non-denominational American member of the big four, made a
brilliant and original addition to its long-established welfare program
in 1961. This was the Ap Chau Island settlement, built for the families
of fishermen.
The people who fish the waters around Ap Chau, a three-acre island in the
northeastern corner of the New Territories, had for generations spent
their entire lives on fishing junks, never establishing homes on shore
or attending schools. But the technical demands of the modern fishing
industry put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they petitioned the
colony government for permission to build homes on Ap Chau and send their
children to school.
Graham French, a Philadelphia philanthropist who was in Hong Kong to
observe CARE operations, heard about the petition and became curious
enough to investigate it thoroughly. He discovered that the petitioners
were so deeply indebted to loan-sharks that they had no real chance to
finance housing ashore unless they got outside funds. He offered to give
$17,500 to get the settlement started, CARE added another $20,000 and the
colony government spent $14,000 to clear a site for the houses.
With these combined funds, a settlement consisting of houses for
forty-eight families, or 360 people, was completed in December, 1961.
The Royal Engineers laid an undersea 1,000-yard pipeline from a mainland
reservoir to supply the island with fresh water. The fishing families,
for their part, formed a community cooperative to administer the scheme.
Rents go into a revolving fund, and members of the co-op can borrow from
it at one percent interest to repair and mechanize their boats.
The fishermen’s wives were at first so naïve about living on shore that
they tried to furnish their houses with a piled-up heap of boards and
braces resembling the poop deck of a fishing junk.
After a time, the seagoing ladies learned to adjust themselves to
conventional tables and chairs. Using sewing machines supplied by
CARE, they took instructions from the government teacher on the island
and learned to sew their own curtains. Their husbands took carpentry
instruction at the same school and produced some acceptable furniture.
Ultimately, the entire project will become self-supporting.
A similar cooperative settlement has been launched at Sai Kung, a market
town in the New Territories. Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie, Hong Kong
industrialists and philanthropists, donated pigs to bolster the domestic
economy of Sai Kung. Three other allied ventures have been okayed by the
government for construction at Tai Tam, on Hong Kong Island, and on the
outlying islands of Tsing Yi and Po Toi.
Numerically, the most extensive of all private welfare groups in Hong
Kong are the Kaifongs, or Chinese neighborhood welfare associations,
with 665,000 members. Operating on slim budgets, they have nevertheless
managed to provide medical care, distribute emergency relief supplies,
conduct hundreds of free classes, set up noodle factories and give
anti-cholera shots.
The Kaifongs are a departure from the older Chinese practice of limiting
charity to your own family or clan; they branch into such community-wide
interests as traffic safety and antinoise campaigns. Once they even put
on a drive to persuade Kowloon kids not to fly their kites in the path
of airliners approaching Kai Tak Airport! (This last one sounds a bit
overzealous, but not to anyone who has stood in the streets of Kowloon
Tong while the jets roared overhead, all but untying his shoelaces with
their vibrations.)
Although the United States government has conducted no regular
foreign-aid program in Hong Kong, it has given the colony almost
$30,000,000 worth of aid, either as surplus foods or as part of its Far
East Refugee Program.
The main burden of relief falls, as it should, on the colony government.
The Hong Kong administration spends $10,000,000 annually on social
welfare work and more than $55,000,000 a year on every form of direct and
indirect aid to its millions of poor residents.
The problem of what to do about its refugees had been with the colony
throughout its history. Whenever China was afflicted by famine, unrest or
revolution, thousands of its people sought temporary haven in Hong Kong.
Perhaps the most noted refugee of the pre-British era was Ti Ping, the
last boy Emperor of the Sung Dynasty, who was driven out of China by the
Mongols in 1279 A.D. He encamped on the Kowloon Peninsula for almost
a year, then resumed his flight to the west, where he was defeated and
drowned in a sea battle with the Mongols. An inscribed rectangular rock
called the Sung Wong T’oi, or Terrace of the Sung Emperor, stands near
Kai Tak Airport to commemorate his stopover.
The British had barely settled in their new colony when a group of
refugees who had been plotting to overthrow the Manchu emperors fled
there in the 1840s. Unwilling to endanger their relations with the
Manchus, the British branded the plotters under the arm and shipped them
back to China. The Tai Ping Rebellion of 1850, fomented by a Christian
Chinese, Hung Siu Tsuen, to depose the Manchus, provoked serious disorder
in Canton and brought another wave of frightened Chinese to Hong Kong.
Thousands of Chinese streamed into the colony during the next decade, but
most of them moved on to the goldfields of California and Australia, or
to contract labor in the Americas and the islands of the Indian Ocean.
Their passage was expedited by labor-traders who often recruited manpower
by kidnaping Orientals and shipping them out in barbarously overcrowded
vessels.
The Boxer Rebellion of 1900, bringing a rash of murders of missionaries
and Chinese Christians, forced thousands to seek safety in Hong Kong. A
far greater number arrived in 1911 when Dr. Sun Yat Sen overthrew the
Manchu Empire. In the early chaotic days of the Chinese Republic about
100,000 refugees came to the crown colony, jamming its housing and
creating prime conditions for a plague outbreak which presently killed
nearly 2,000 persons.
There was a brief reversal in the direction of the refugee procession
when Britain entered World War I and 60,000 Chinese turned back home.
But continuing disorders in China brought many right back to Hong Kong,
and the southward drift persisted through the 1920s.
When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the drift became a tidal wave;
in two years 600,000 refugees crossed the border. The population had
reached 1,600,000 when the Japanese attacked Hong Kong in December, 1941.
Having no desire to support such a large population, the Japanese
conquerors set to work to reduce the head-count. Their methods were a
model of brutality; starvation, execution and driving the Chinese back to
their homeland with bayonets. All who attempted to detach themselves from
the northbound herd were instantly killed. By the end of the war, the
Japanese had cut the colony population to less than 600,000.
During the war, the colony came perilously close to losing its chances
of ever being returned to its place in the British Empire. At the Yalta
Conference, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Stalin privately
that he thought Hong Kong should be returned to China or made into an
internationalized free port after the Japanese were defeated.
Nothing was said to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had flatly
opposed every attempt to whittle down Britain’s colonial possessions. Ten
years after, when asked about the Roosevelt proposal, Churchill replied,
“According to the American record [of the Yalta Conference], President
Roosevelt said he knew I would have strong objections to this suggestion.
That was certainly correct—and even an understatement.”
Chiang Kai-shek also campaigned for the return of Hong Kong to China and
almost as soon as the war ended, James F. Byrnes, American Secretary of
State, announced that the future status of Hong Kong would be determined
at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. As soon as they learned
about this, the British, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, registered
their emphatic disapproval and the idea died without further discussion.
Although Hong Kong did not go back to China, the Chinese went back to
Hong Kong. During the postwar struggles of Nationalist and Communist
forces, thousands of their Chinese countrymen removed to Hong Kong,
including virtually all who had been driven from the colony by the
Japanese. But the great human avalanche came in 1949, when the Reds
gained absolute control of the country. Fugitives from Communist
“liberation” swarmed into Hong Kong at the rate of 10,000 a week.
One year after the Communists took over, the colony’s population reached
2,360,000. More than 330,000 people were living in hillside squatter
settlements, sleeping on the sidewalks, on tenement rooftops, even in
the center strip of the widest Kowloon streets. A shacktown fire in
1950 drove 20,000 persons from their homes. The next year a single fire
dishoused 10,000 people, and a series of fires in 1952 burned out 15,000
others.
Sooner or later, colony officials told themselves, the refugees would
return to China as the immigrant waves of other years had done. The
government took a firm stand on the doctrine that it was not supposed
to become the landlord for millions of its residents, but it yielded
sufficiently to erect temporary wooden huts and bungalows for 40,000
squatters.
All the high-principled resolutions to stay out of the public
housing business were swept away on Christmas Night, 1953. A roaring
conflagration broke out at Shek Kip Mei, in Upper Kowloon, racing up
the tiers of hillside shacks as if it were mounting a flight of steps.
Somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 people were left homeless. About half
of them found shelter with friends or relatives, and the government was
plunged into the enormous task of feeding, clothing and rehousing the
fire victims.
Pausing just long enough to permit the displaced people to sift their
few remaining possessions from the ashes, the government bulldozed
the 45-acre site, leveled the ground, and had erected emergency
accommodations on it in fifty-three days. The streets had hardly been
cleared of homeless people when a new shack fire at Tai Hang Tung
dishoused 24,000 others.
Simultaneously, the colony recognized the inadequacy of its
cottage-and-bungalow housing, which required too much land and provided
for too few people. It began the construction of multi-story resettlement
estates—six- and seven-story blocks of reinforced concrete clustered
together in populous communities. Eleven such estates, lodging 360,000
people in fireproof and typhoon-proof structures, have been completed
since 1954 at a cost of $32,000,000. One toilet is shared by hundreds
of people and there is no electric light in the rooms unless the tenant
pays extra for it. But when they are seen beside the remaining shacks,
the multi-story blocks seem immeasurably superior. In addition to the
multi-story estates, 80,000 persons have been housed in fourteen cottage
resettlement areas.
An apartment in a resettlement block is a concrete-walled room, renting
for $1.60 to $4.60 a month. The Hong Kong Housing Authority has built a
higher-quality low-cost apartment in skyscraper developments, renting
from $8 to $23 a month, and 106,000 persons are to be accommodated in
them by 1964.
Around 30,000 people live in flats built by the Hong Kong Housing
Society, a voluntary group aided by government loan funds, and this
number will be doubled in a few years. If the colony maintains its
present rate of building, it can provide new apartments for 100,000
persons annually for the next five years.
This small mountain of statistics looms large on the landscape until you
consider that there are now about 500,000 to 600,000 people living in
squatter shacks, on sidewalks and rooftops and in tumbledown firetrap
tenements. Theoretically, they could all be rehoused in five or six
years, but the colony’s population is rising meanwhile at the rate of
150,000 a year.
The dreams of Hong Kong housing officials are haunted by figures; a baby
born every five minutes and illegal immigrants sneaking across the border
at an incalculable rate. Illegal immigration is never estimated at less
than 10,000 a year and often set as high as 40,000. Popular guesswork may
jack it up to 20,000 a month.
In its own protection, the colony has been forced to forbid further
immigration, except at an approximate rate of fifty a day. Its
only shield against a smothering horde of advancing people is the
effectiveness of its land and marine police. To the extent that the
border police can restrain illegal immigration, the colony may be able to
catch up with its housing needs, provided, of course, that the birth rate
tapers off.
The colony’s marine police are a small, well-trained force contending
with overwhelming odds. Their fleet of 27 boats and 610 men is charged
with patrolling 400 miles of coastline and 728 square miles of
territorial waters. They have one 58-foot boat with a top speed of 22
knots and three jet boats of 20-foot length, useful in hot pursuit, with
a maximum speed of 42 knots. Their 70-foot launches mount a 50-caliber
Browning machine-gun on the foredeck and carry a cache of smaller arms,
but they deliver no more than 11 knots.
As many as five of the patrol boats may be out on duty at one time, but
the sea lanes from Macao and China are crowded with ships at all hours.
A police launch cruising along the western edge of Hong Kong waters on a
clear day will often have forty vessels within its sight.
There are red sails in every sunset off Lantau, largest and westernmost
of Hong Kong’s 237 islands. The skipper of a police launch may spend
every spare moment scanning the horizon for suspicious-looking craft,
but even in full daylight he cannot hope to detect and halt all the
smugglers. At night, when the smugglers slip through fog or run without
lights, the skipper’s chances are considerably slimmer. The Red Chinese
gunboats are also on the prowl just beyond territorial limits, hoping to
catch their runaway countrymen, but they are often unsuccessful.
The Hong Kong courts charged 1,551 illegal immigrants in 1961; another
1,763 were intercepted by the marine police and sent back to China.
Thousands of others slipped through the net either at Macao or Hong Kong.
Here are a few typical incidents that occurred during two months in the
winter of 1961-62.
Eighty-three men, women, and children stole a Chinese military launch and
escaped to Macao. Marine police caught seventy-three illegal immigrants
in a motor junk off Lamma Island. Police discovered thirty-two men and
women attempting to slip past Castle Peak in a sailing junk. A woman and
two children were arrested in Tai Tam Bay, Hong Kong Island. A Communist
gunboat intercepted a sampan near Lappa Island, opposite Macao, firing
shots into the hull and driving the dozen women and children aboard back
to Red territory. A Red gunboat fired on a junk at the mouth of the
Canton River estuary, sinking it with all twenty-nine immigrants aboard.
During the same period, an unknown number of illegal immigrants swam
across Starling Inlet from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong, using rafts
and basketballs to keep themselves afloat. A middle-aged man swam from
Lappa Island to Macao under the muzzles of Communist guns to visit his
son. On every dark night or at any time there is a chance of screening
their passage in foggy or overcast weather, the immigrants keep coming in.
Marine police inspectors say there is a well-organized traffic in
smuggling illegal immigrants. Smugglers can buy a second-hand junk in
Macao and stuff its hold with twenty to forty immigrants. They have
a regular scale of prices based on the financial blood-count of each
customer; $40 for well-heeled Shanghai Chinese, $30 for a moderately
solvent Fukienese, and $13 to $20 for a Cantonese farmer or laborer. If
the smugglers fall into the hands of the marine police, they may spend
a year in prison, and their passengers will be sent back to an ice-cold
reception in Red China. Jail sentences seldom keep smugglers from
returning to the trade; the profits justify the risk.
“If we catch a boat with people that look like genuine fishermen, we
may warn them to get a Hong Kong operating license and let them go,” a
marine police inspector said. “If we spot one that looks like a regular
smuggler, we arrest the whole bunch.”
The marine police crews are predominantly Cantonese; first-class seamen
and courageous policemen, but at best they can scarcely hope to snare
more than a minority of those who are determined to break through the
blockade. When the successful ones reach Hong Kong Island or one of
the sheltered coves of the New Territories, they are met by friends,
relatives or confederates of the smugglers. They vanish into the almost
impenetrable masses of Chinese and emerge a few months later to register
as residents. In most cases the British have no alternative but to accept
them.
Many of the police are themselves refugees from Red China. They perform
their antismuggling duties conscientiously, but if refugees get through
despite their best efforts and vigilance, they may be something less than
heartbroken.
Protection of the land border with Red China is the responsibility of the
200 uniformed men of the Frontier Division, with headquarters at Fanling,
four miles south of the border. Measured in a straight line, the border
is only thirteen miles long, but 22 miles as it follows a snaky line from
Deep Bay in the west to Mirs Bay in the east. On the colony side, it is
backed up by a closed zone which varies in depth from a few hundred yards
to a mile. No one except police, farmers living in the area, or persons
carrying special passes from the Commissioner of Police is allowed to
enter or move about in the closed area.