border was fenced on the British side, and the stoutness of the fence was
variable—high and topped with barbed wire at some places, but no more
than a plain, low fence at others. The storming of the barrier in 1962
caused the British to build an entirely new one which stretched the full
length of the border. Crowned with many strands of barbed wire, it stood
10 feet high and was laid out like a long cage, with 20 feet of enclosed
ground between the outer, parallel fences.
Between the marshlands on the west and the hilly country in the east, the
Frontier Division police have three main stations and nine police posts.
From each of these, police observers scan the border with binoculars.
Foot patrols also keep a continuous watch along the boundary. At night,
when the closed area is under curfew, searchlights and dogs are added to
the regular patrols. When the integrity of the border is as seriously
threatened as it was by the spring invasion of 1962, the closed area may
be increased to a depth of three miles, as Governor Black ordered on May
19, 1962.
Under normal conditions, farmers who live along the border enjoy a
kind of twilight-zone immunity. Known to the patrols, they may cross
the border during the day to work either in Hong Kong or China without
molestation, but they must be home before nightfall, because the border,
with all its rail and road connections, shuts down at dark. Night
crossings, even before the 10-foot barrier went up, were discouraged by
peremptory challenges and bullets.
The Reds have no fence on their side of the border. They do not need it;
nobody wants to get in.
Why did the Red Chinese permit the transborder flight of May, 1962?
At first it was interpreted as a deliberate attempt to embarrass the
British, and certainly the colony’s police and military units had a
thankless assignment. When they transported the captured refugees back to
the border, they were jeered at and reviled by colony residents. Protests
were issued by international relief officials.
The onus soon shifted to Red China, which was revealed by the exodus as a
land of hunger. All news from Communist China is censored or second-hand,
so no accurate explanation of the flight could be made at the time. It
appeared, however, that industrial retrenchment in the cities of China
had caused many city-dwellers to move to rural areas, perhaps to seek
food, perhaps to bolster the country’s sagging farm production.
Most of those who crossed the border in the big May surge were from
the adjoining province of Kwangtung, indicating that free movement of
people within China was confined to this one southern area. Most of those
interviewed in Hong Kong complained that they were hungry, and that
they had lived on a substandard diet for months with no real hope of
improvement.
There was a momentary temptation to regard the flight as a sign that
civil government had collapsed in Communist China, but this hope faded
on May 25, when the Reds again sealed off the border. No official
explanation for the turn-about was made, but newspapermen in the colony
suspected that a sharp British protest to Peking may have prompted the
clamp-down.
To the refugees in Hong Kong, the world spotlight meant very little,
except that it may have made other countries aware that no place in the
world has shielded so many fugitives from Communist tyranny as the crown
colony.
CHAPTER THREE
Conflict and Coexistence with Two Chinas
“There is a saying in China; ‘If the east wind does not prevail
over the west wind, then the west wind will prevail over the
east wind.’ I think the characteristic of the current situation
is that the east wind prevails over the west wind; that is, the
strength of socialism exceeds the strength of imperialism.”—MAO
TSE-TUNG, MOSCOW, 1957
So spoke the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party at a time when all
the winds seemed to be blowing his way. For eight years the People’s
Republic of China had performed with the disciplined enthusiasm of a
collegiate cheering section, expanding its industrial capacity at a
prodigious rate and disseminating its political influence throughout
Asia. Soviet Russia had given complete ideological support and technical
assistance to its junior partner in world Communism.
Since then, the winds have shifted to a new quarter. The Great Leap
Forward that began in 1958 has struck a dead calm. Backyard factories
and foundries have failed to attain either the standards or quantity of
production anticipated, but they succeeded for a time in clogging the
country’s transportation system and in interfering with the distribution
of food and other consumer goods. The same confused planning that turned
the emphasis from large-scale industrial production to backyard factories
also transformed the traditional small Chinese farm and the medium-sized
collective farm into titanic agricultural communes. By a combination of
mismanagement and adverse growing conditions, the communes have brought
about the worst food shortage in China’s recent history.
In the summer of 1961, the prevailing winds from Moscow turned
unseasonably icy as an ideological split developed between Russia and
China. No one outside the Communist partnership could assess the full
significance of the break, but it offered very little prospect of
increased Soviet assistance to Communist China.
Every change in the political winds of mainland China creates an eddy
in Hong Kong. In the eight years when Red China was swept along by
the momentum of its revolutionary spirit, the colony was beset by a
succession of incidents. British ships and planes became the target
for Chinese Communist guns. Long after the mainland fell under the
unchallenged domination of the Reds, the grim warfare between Communists
and Nationalists continued in the streets of Hong Kong.
Whether by coincidence or direct cause, the second year of the Great Leap
Forward brought an unexpected lull in the Communist harassment of the
colony. Left-wing agitation in the schools and trade unions persisted,
but colony officials noticed that Communist sympathizers, once so avid
for violent strikes and street demonstrations, seemed to have lost their
appetite for both. The assumption was that Peking had told them they
could expect no further support from that source. At the same time,
shooting incidents and border clashes virtually ceased.
There was no disposition in the colony to regard this undeclared
armistice as a bid for reconciliation. The news that the Great Leap had
made its first big stumble was already in circulation, and the colony
administration, quite unofficially, reached its own conclusion; Communist
China was temporarily too busy mopping up its own mess to indulge its
normal passion for badgering Hong Kong. When China’s house had restored
order, its Communist leadership would be right back at the colony’s
throat.
Hong Kong’s colonial administration has never deluded itself with
the belief that it could survive a massive assault by Red China. In
population and the size of its armed forces, Hong Kong is outnumbered by
approximately 200 to 1. Against Japan in 1941, Hong Kong’s resistance
lasted less than three weeks; against Red China, it might last about half
as long.
But there are certain restraining factors unreflected in the comparative
strength of the opposing land forces. The most tangible of these are the
ships of the British and United States navies, continually riding at
anchor in Hong Kong harbor or cruising in the surrounding seas. Aircraft
carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers equipped with planes and
missiles tend to put the brakes on impulsive acts of aggression by an
inferior naval power.
A Communist grab for Hong Kong would almost inevitably involve Red China
in a major war. Great Britain has shown no disposition to surrender this
profitable possession without a fight, and although the United States
has made no specific pledge to defend the colony, it is not likely to let
the Chinese Communists snatch it from her principal ally.
Red China’s instinctive belligerence may be tempered by the fate of its
first outright aggression, which did not keep the United Nations out of
Korea, but did a great deal to keep Red China out of the United Nations
for years thereafter.
Aided in part by these considerations, Hong Kong has sat since 1949 on
the doorstep of a country dedicated to its destruction. In the late
1940s, it was felt that a substantial cut in the colony’s trade with
China would ruin the British enclave by purely peaceful methods. Most of
the trade has been lost since then, but Hong Kong has perversely grown
more prosperous than ever before.
The overriding reason why Hong Kong continues to thrive in the shadow of
its hostile neighbor is economic. Ideologies apart, they need each other.
Despite the drop in their total trade, Hong Kong remains Red China’s
chief non-Communist trading partner. In recent years it has become a
lop-sided arrangement, with the Chinese Communists shipping ten times
more goods to the colony than they purchase from her. Yet the imbalance
appears to suit the purposes of both sides.
Hong Kong, which cannot produce enough food to sustain its population
for more than a few months of the year, has imported an average of
$200,000,000 worth of goods from Red China in each of the last three
years, and food represents more than a third of the total. In the same
years, Red China imported about $20,000,000 annually from the colony.
Thus the Reds earned a favorable trade balance of $180,000,000 a year,
giving them the foreign exchange they need as critically as Hong Kong
needs food.
It may be wondered why the Chinese Communists, with three successive crop
failures, are willing to export any of their food. But they must earn
foreign exchange to pay for grain, flour, powdered milk and sugar to save
themselves from starvation, and their food purchases in the world market
during 1960 and 1961 ran up a bill of $360,000,000.
The whole pattern of mainland-colony trade has been reversed since
1950. In that year, their trade came to $406,000,000, or about a third
of Hong Kong’s total world trade of $1,314,000,000. By 1960, the total
colony-mainland trade had skidded to $228,000,000 and represented only
one-seventh of the colony’s world trade volume of $1,716,000,000.
In 1950, Hong Kong exported $255,000,000 to Red China, but imported
only $151,000,000 from her. The crown colony still serves as a major
transshipment port for China’s trade with other countries, but her
importance as an exporter and re-exporter from other countries to China
was painfully diminished by United Nations and United States embargoes
during the Korean war.
The pinch of those embargoes was so tight that it looked for a while
as if Hong Kong, which had prospered on its Chinese export trade for
110 years, would wither from the loss of it. To the amazement of its
economic obituary writers, the colony side-stepped its assigned grave
by developing its own industries. Within a few years, Hong Kong became
bigger as a manufacturer than it had ever been as a trader.
Red China’s benefits from the existing trade with Hong Kong go further
than the earning of foreign exchange from a favorable trading balance.
She also trades profitably in human misery. The Chinese refugees who fled
to Hong Kong are the prime victims of this merciless squeeze.
No matter how intensely the refugees dislike the Communist regime on the
mainland, they have not severed their ties with friends and relatives in
China. They are the first to know of economic reverses and crop failure
inside China because the news is brought to them by travelers crossing
the colony border. It is a story repeated by almost every new refugee who
escapes from the homeland to Macao or Hong Kong.
The effect on the Chinese in Hong Kong is irresistible; by every
tradition of family loyalty they are compelled to help their starving
kinsmen in China. In obedience to this obligation, the Hong Kong Chinese
sent 13,000,000 two-pound packets of food and other household needs
through the colony’s post office in 1961 to friends and relatives across
the border.
The squeeze takes the form of customs duties which often exceed the value
of the goods shipped. If the sender mails his parcel from a Hong Kong
post office, the receiver in China pays the duty when it arrives. But the
duty can be any amount the Red Chinese officials choose to assign, and
many recipients refuse the parcels because they cannot pay for them. If
a parcel agent handles the shipment, sending it through the Chinese post
offices across the frontier or through his own agents inside China, the
Hong Kong sender has to pay all the duties in colony currency before it
starts on its way.
One Chinese resident who came to the colony in 1962 told _The South China
Morning Post_, a Hong Kong English-language daily, that the Red Chinese
government was taking in about $53,000 a day on these parcel duties,
with the peak of the loot coming at Chinese New Year, when presents
are shipped home in the greatest numbers. A vast percentage of the
parcel-senders were poor people, and each parcel cost them anywhere from
a day’s to a week’s wages, or more.
The external harmony which has prevailed between the colony and the
mainland since 1959 offers a glaring contrast to the discord that
preceded it. Ever since 1949, the Reds have been taking angry swipes
at the colony, a game in which their worst enemies, the Chinese
Nationalists, frequently joined.
In the year that the Reds gained control of the mainland, trade relations
and communications between China and Hong Kong were broken off. The
Kowloon-Canton Railway suspended transborder operations and Communist
guerrilla forces lined up threateningly along the frontier.
While the Communists pressed the colony from the north, the Nationalists
launched a blockade of all ports along the Chinese coast. Caught between
the opposing forces, the colony banned political societies with outside
allegiance and bolstered its own defenses. Additional lands and buildings
were requisitioned for military use and 900 volunteer soldiers were added
to its garrison.
Great Britain sought to relieve the existing tension by recognizing
Red China on February 6, 1950, but there was no exchange of diplomatic
representatives. Swelling tides of Chinese refugees continued to pour
across the frontier and the colony instituted its first immigration
controls in May, 1950.
The initial breach in Hong Kong’s policy of cautious neutrality came on
June 5, 1950, when two Nationalist warships, enforcing their own blockade
against the Reds, attacked the 800-ton British merchant vessel _Cheung
Hing_. This dreadnought, steaming along with a cargo of fertilizer
from Amoy, was raked with Nationalist shells which killed six of her
passengers and wounded six others.
Early in August, 1950, the Reds produced their own series of incidents.
Communist gunboats fired on three British ships just outside Hong Kong
territorial waters and an armed Red junk bombarded the American freighter
_Steel Rover_. The day after the _Rover_ incident, a Communist shore
battery on Ling Ting Island, a few miles outside the southern limit
of Hong Kong waters, directed its cannon and machine guns against the
British freighter _Hangsang_, wounding two British officers. Communist
forts in the same area fired on the Norwegian freighter _Pleasantville_
on August 6, but no hits were scored.
The shootings were collectively interpreted as a Red warning to keep all
Allied shipping away from her installations on Ling Ting and the nearby
Lema and Ladrone islands. On August 17, the British destroyer _Concord_
replied to the warning by exchanging a half-hour of shellfire with the
Communist forts.
None of these incidents was as disruptive as the Communist agitation
inside the colony. Here the core of the trouble arose from the Hong Kong
Federation of Trade Unions, or FTU, an openly pro-Red group with more
than sixty member unions whose power was concentrated in shipyards,
textile mills and public utilities. The FTU succeeded in fomenting a
streetcar strike in 1949. With zealous devotion to the party line,
the FTU unions shoved themselves into every labor dispute they could
penetrate. They also displayed a touching concern for the unhappy living
conditions of the refugees, undeterred by the fact that most of the
refugees obviously preferred them to conditions in Communist China.
A flash fire in a refugee settlement on November 21, 1951, drove 10,000
persons from their shacks and enabled Red China to rush in with the offer
to send a relief mission. The Communist angels of mercy were to be met at
the Hong Kong terminus of the Kowloon-Canton Railway by a banner-waving
group of left-wing welcomers. They failed to show up, and a riot broke
out in which there was one fatality and thirty injuries before police
brought it under control.
The left-wing unions trumpeted their public concern for the refugees by a
number of street demonstrations which police barely managed to keep from
exploding into new riots. Wearying of the skirmishes, Police Commissioner
Duncan MacIntosh tried a new tack. With the consent of Governor Alexander
Grantham, he offered to satisfy the strident Communist demands to improve
the refugees’ lot by paying full transportation costs and expenses of ten
Hong Kong dollars to every person who wanted to return to any part of Red
China. The only acceptance came from an old man who wanted to be buried
with his ancestors in Northern China.
The sea-lane incidents resumed on September 25, 1952, when a Communist
gunboat halted the Macao ferry with a burst of warning shots, searched
the ship and removed a Chinese passenger. In the same year, there were
two other Communist and three Nationalist attacks on British ships.
A Communist warship came upon a Royal Naval launch in the Pearl River
estuary on September 10, 1953, riddled it with shells and killed six men,
wounding five others. A stiff British protest was delivered to Peking
without bringing either an apology or compensation. The Nationalists kept
up their end of the harassment in that month with one of their warships
firing on the British destroyer _St. Bride’s Bay_ off the China coast.
Each of these incidents stirred the British government to send protests
to Peking or Taipeh, but they usually elicited only transient interest
outside the countries directly involved.
The Chinese Communists’ capture of two American newsmen and an American
merchant-marine captain on March 21, 1953, brought the United States
government into the long succession of Hong Kong incidents. The reaction
was quick and angry, for the Reds had subjected the United States to an
unceasing campaign of vilification and had already imprisoned more than
thirty American civilians in China. The Dixon-Applegate case came as a
kind of climactic tail-twister.
Richard Applegate, National Broadcasting Company correspondent in Hong
Kong, and Donald Dixon, International News Service correspondent in
Korea, were sailing five miles west of Lantau Island on Applegate’s
42-foot sailboat, the _Kert_, when they were stopped by a Chinese gunboat
manned by Chinese soldiers. The newsmen, accompanied by merchant marine
Captain Benjamin Krasner, his Chinese fiancée and two Chinese sailors,
were in international waters, bound for Macao on a pleasure cruise.
Protests that they were violating no law had no effect on the Reds, who
accused them of straying into Chinese waters.
The _Kert_ and its six passengers were towed to the Communist base at
Lap Sap Mei, transferred to Canton and held prisoners until September
15, 1954. The United States protested vehemently to Peking, and Great
Britain joined in demands that the group be set free. Harry J. Anslinger,
United States Commissioner of Narcotics, had a private revelation which
he duly reported to the United Nations: The _Kert_ had been captured
by Chinese narcotics smugglers, led by Lu Wang-tse, a notorious woman
pirate! Nothing more was heard of the lady known as Lu—Applegate said
after his release that he could not imagine how the preposterous tale had
originated, but the Red Chinese let many months pass before they admitted
the capture.
When the three Americans were finally released, they had suffered
physically from a skimpy diet of practically inedible food. Captain
Krasner’s fiancée, and one of the crewmen, a British subject living in
Hong Kong, were subsequently allowed to leave China, but the other
Chinese crewman remained a prisoner.
The international repercussions of the Dixon-Applegate affair were
intensified by a fresh provocation which called ships and planes of the
United States, Britain and France into emergency action. This was the
callous and apparently senseless shooting down of a British-owned Cathay
Pacific Airways C-54 Skymaster on July 23, 1954, with the loss of ten
lives, by three Red Chinese LA-9 Lavochkin piston-engined fighter planes.
The Skymaster, carrying twelve passengers and a crew of six, took off
from the Bangkok airport at 8:28 P.M., heading northeast in bright
moonlight over Thailand and Indochina for the 1,071-mile flight to Hong
Kong. The passenger load was light, so most people occupied window seats.
The sun rose soon after the plane flew out over the South China Sea. Cape
Bastion, the southeastern tip of Hainan Island, a Communist possession
about the size of Denmark, became visible 50 miles away. Below, a brisk
southwest wind whipped the sea into whitecaps.
Co-Pilot Cedric Carlton suggested a time-saving route nearer to Hainan,
but Captain Phillip Blown decided to hold his present course, keeping
far away from Hainan to avoid another of the Red charges that their
twelve-mile limit was being violated by non-Communist flyers. At 8:45
A.M., Carlton looked out a starboard window and shouted to Captain Blown
that two cream-colored fighter planes with Red Chinese markings were
coming up fast from the rear on his side. Captain Blown put the plane on
automatic pilot, took a quick look back through the port window and saw a
third fighter zeroing in on his side of the tail.
“Without any warning, they opened up with machine-gun and cannon fire,”
Captain Blown later wrote in his report. “The noise and the shambles from
their guns was terrific. It was obviously a premeditated attack.”
The hail of bullets from short range immediately set fire to the
Skymaster’s left outboard engine, and the No. 4 engine on the far right.
Flames burst from the auxiliary and main fuel tanks beside the No. 4
engine at almost the same moment.
Captain Blown, flying at 9,000 feet, instantly went into a dive. He
turned sharply left and right as he descended, trying to shake the
pursuing fighters, and headed for the sea at 300 miles an hour. He was
fighting to get out of the line of fire long enough to dump his gas and
check the flames that were eating away a broad section of the skin on his
right wing.
The guns of the LA-9s kept up their clatter on his tail and bullets
tore through the plane cabin, splintering the interior and killing
several passengers. Bullets whizzed past the two pilots and smashed the
boost pressure and fuel-flow gauges. At 5,000 feet, the rudder controls
snapped; at 3,000, the right aileron control was shot off. The No. 4
engine was feathered, but its extinguisher failed to stifle the raging
flames.
The Skymaster began to stall groggily toward the right, but Captain Blown
checked it by throttling back his two left-wing engines and pouring full
power on No. 3, the only operative engine on the right side. The ship’s
speed dropped to 160 miles an hour, and the right wing began to dip.