within. The Chinese junk, famous throughout the world as the symbol of
Hong Kong, has dropped its picturesque sails; more than 4,000 of them now
churn along under Diesel power. The Chinese junk is as diverse in its
size, shape and function as the infinitely varied Chinese people. There
are sixteen different classes of junks in Hong Kong alone, and none of
them closely resembles a junk from any other part of China. They are
single-, double- and triple-masted; they are little craft 25 feet long or
lumbering giants of 100 foot length. To a colony fisheries expert, “junk”
is only a loose generic term; he immediately classifies it according
to the job it is designed for, as a long-liner (four classes by size),
seiner (two main types, depending on the net it uses), trawler (four
main types, depending on the kind of trawling it does), gill-netters,
fish-collecting junks and several miscellaneous varieties.
Since the British came to Hong Kong, the junks operating in local waters
have borrowed design features from European ships. The big fishing junks
of Hong Kong, with their high stern, horizontal rails and the large,
perforated rudder pivoting in a deep, vertical groove on the stern,
resemble no other junks in the world. Like junks from all parts of China,
and even the boats of ancient Egypt, they have an oculus, or painted
image of the human eye, on their bow. In fishing junks, the center of the
eye is directed downward so that it can keep a close watch on the fish;
trading junks have the eye aimed higher so that it can scan the distant
horizon. The bow eyes of the old-fashioned sailing junks no longer have
much to look forward to. The deep-sea trawlers, operating as far as
250 miles out, are all mechanized. The sailing junks operate closer to
shore, but the cargo-carrying junks in Victoria harbor are predominantly
mechanized. To anyone who has crossed the harbor recently it is obvious
that the sails are disappearing at an alarming rate.
The fishermen who live and work on junks instead of viewing them
abstractly from a distance have not yet formed a Committee for the
Preservation of the Romantic Junk. After approaching mechanization with
reluctance and suspicion in 1948, they became convinced that the big
sailing junk is through. Motorized junks can reach the distant fishing
grounds much faster, they catch a lion’s share of the fish, and they
return to market far ahead of sail competition. Because of their greater
speed and stability, they can venture out in the typhoon season when sail
craft are obliged to stick closer to shore. Within ten years, fishing
authorities say, the sailing junk will have become virtually extinct.
It has been proposed that the Hong Kong Tourist Association hire a
couple of junks to sail up and down the harbor for the sole delectation
of tourists, but no official action has been taken. Tourists can travel
40 miles west to Macao where the harbor is still crowded with sailing
junks. Here the sails persist only because the Macao fishing industry
lacks the low-interest loans available to Hong Kong fishermen through the
Fish Marketing Organization and the fishing co-ops. Without such credit,
very few fishermen could afford Diesel engines or other motor-driven
equipment. In Hong Kong, even the little 4-horsepower engines of sampans
are bought on credit.
Now that progress has reached the fishing fleet, it will not be satisfied
until it changes everything. Under the direction of such knowledgeable
men as Jack Cater, co-op and fisheries commissioner, Lieutenant Commander
K. Stather, fishing master, and Wing-Hong Cheung, craft technician on
modern junk design, the whole junk-building industry is being turned
upside down.
For centuries, the junk has been built without plans or templates, with
the designers proceeding entirely by habit and skill. This is relatively
easy in building a 15-foot sampan, but when it is extended to 100-ton
vessels of 90-foot length it becomes both art and architecture. The size
of the investment, by local standards, is staggering: $40,000 for a large
trawler and its mechanized equipment, and around $7,000 for a mechanized
40-footer.
There are nearly 100 junk-building yards in the colony, but no more
than ten of these are capable of building a junk from blueprints. The
fisheries department is conducting boat-design classes in three major
fishing centers, Aberdeen, Shau Kei Wan and Cheung Chau, and training
builders to read plans. The classes are held at night to avoid conflict
with working hours, and the courses are for three months.
The junk-building yards present a vivid picture of a civilization in
transition. At one yard, a workman is laboriously breaming the hull of
a sampan—killing marine borers by passing bundles of burning hay beside
and beneath it—and a workman or two in an adjoining yard are covering
the hull of another boat with anti-fouling paint. The object of the two
operations is identical, but the anti-fouling paint protects the wood
about four times as long as breaming and takes no longer to apply. On the
port side of an 86-foot trawler, a Chinese carpenter is using a half-inch
electric power drill; on the starboard, another man is drilling holes
with a steel bit spun by a leather thong with its ends fixed to a wooden
bow.
Lu Pan, the Celestial master builder who transmitted the secrets of
carpentry and shipbuilding to mankind, is honored with a tiny shrine
in an obscure corner of every yard. Joss sticks are lighted before a
statuette of this practical divinity, and his birthday observance on the
13th day of the Sixth Moon is a holiday in the shipyards. Lu Pan has not
yet betrayed any overt sign of annoyance at the invasion of his domain by
power tools and Diesel engines.
The timber that is cut for these all-wooden ships is tough and
durable—China fir, teak, and various hardwoods chiefly from Borneo, like
billian, kapor and yacal. The planks are hewn at mills near the yards,
and bent to fit the curvature of the hull. The curving is accomplished by
heating the center of the plank with a small fire and weighting its ends
with heavy stones to set the curve. The 3-inch-thick planks are secured
to the upright framing members with 14-inch steel spikes, and the main
stringer, just below deck level, is fastened with threaded bolts. Despite
the general disarray of the open yards and the lack of precise plans,
the junk almost invariably turns out to be a nicely dovetailed, exactly
balanced boat, good for twenty or thirty years of service in the rough
weather of the China Sea.
The long-liner ranks as the giant of the junk fleet, having an overall
length between 80 and 100 feet. Junks of this class fish from 20 to 60
miles south of the colony, cruising above a vast expanse of underwater
flats where depths seldom exceed 90 feet and the muddy bottom makes other
kinds of fishing unfeasible.
A typical long-liner under construction at the Yee Hop Shipyard in Shau
Kei Wan has a 90-foot length and the elephantine stern characteristic of
its class. Its high poop carries bunks for 16 men, with additional bunks
located forward and a total crew capacity of 57 men, sandwiched in with
no more than a yard of clearance between upper and lower bunks. Eight
sampans can be stowed along its deck and lowered over the side when the
fishing grounds are reached. Despite its traditional outline, it has
Diesel engines, twin-screw propellors and a 20-ton fishhold lined with
modern insulation material.
Costing about $36,000 with full equipment, one long-liner, for example,
was ordered by Hai Lee Chan, a Shau Kei Wan fisherman who already owned
another like it, plus two smaller junks. During the two and one-half
months that 35 carpenters required to complete it, Mrs. Chan and her
twelve-year-old daughter remained on or around the junk to keep a
watchful eye on its construction. A long-liner of this kind may put out
as many as 100,000 hooks on lines attached to its bow and stern or strung
out by its covey of sampans. A single trip to the fishing grounds may
keep it at sea for a week or more and bring a ten-ton catch of golden
thread, shark and lizard fish.
Comparable in size but differing completely in design are two deep-sea
trawlers built at the Kwong Lee Cheung Shipyard in Kowloon. These are
sister ships, 86 feet long, and the first ones of their size that
faithfully followed the modern specifications laid down by Mr. Cheung and
the Fisheries Department. They were the first big trawlers constructed
according to written plans and framed around modern templates or patterns
in Hong Kong.
As they neared completion late in 1961, the twin wooden trawlers of 100
tons each looked more like dismasted clipper ships than junks. The old
type of high poop had been cut down and crew quarters moved forward. The
fat, bulging stern had been slimmed down to improve the streamline, and
the traditional rudder-slot was gone. The deck was level and uncluttered,
with far more working space than older junks provided. The outline of the
hull was slim and graceful, giving more longitudinal stability than the
tub-bottomed junk. The free-swinging tiller and massive wooden rudder had
been replaced by a ship’s wheel and a much smaller rudder of steel that
turned on a metal shaft. Powered winches would be welded to their decks.
Mechanized and streamlined, the new trawlers could deliver more speed
than a motorized trawler of conventional shape, and require less fuel to
do it.
When the two partners who had ordered the trawlers, fishermen Lee Loy
Shing and Cheng Chung Kay, smilingly greeted visitors to the yard,
pointing out the features of their new ships with considerable pride,
it was evident that they regarded the old-style junk as an expensive
antique. Mechanization has already proved itself; although mechanized
boats number less than half the fishing fleet, they take 80 percent of
the catch. Many fishermen are beginning to believe that modern ship
design is as important to the future of Hong Kong’s fishing fleet as
mechanization.
Steel-hulled trawlers of the Japanese “bull” type are already being used
by the fishing companies in the colony. One dozen of them operate in the
Gulf of Tong King, near Hainan Island. However, they are much too costly
for most fishing families.
Colony fishing methods are as varied as the boats used. The deep-sea
trawlers, generally working in pairs, drag a huge bag-shaped net along
the sea bottom, gathering in horsehead and red snapper, or red goatfish
and golden thread. Purse-seiners, working in pairs and fairly close
to shore, stretch a big net between them at night and use a bright
light to lure such smaller fish as anchovies and carangoid into the
net. The Pa T’eng seiners set gill nets along the bottom for yellow
croaker, and drift nets for white pomfret and mackerel. Other types
include gill-netters, shrimp beam-trawlers, and three smaller classes of
long-liners. About twenty kinds of fish form most of the catch, and among
these are conger pike, big eyes, grouper, young barracuda and red sea
bream.
The ship carpenters of Hong Kong are far above average ability, so much
so that the Chinese Communists have attempted, without notable success,
to induce them to build junks in China. Demand for their skills has,
however, raised their wages about one-third in the last two years.
The fishermen have had their rigid conservatism shattered by the changes
around them. In spite of their usual illiteracy, they have learned the
rules of navigation at fisheries department schools. More advanced
classes have qualified for licenses as engineers, pilots, navigators
and boat-builders. For the first time they have lodged their families
on shore, with the wives becoming used to housekeeping and the children
attending schools.
Many Westerners, seeing this upheaval in the fine, free life of the
fisherman, deplore the passing of the old ways. The fishermen, always
quicker at grabbing for prosperity than in clinging to romantic
illusions, are moving forward at top speed without a thought to their
suddenly disappearing past.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Crime, Power and Corruption
“We have absolutely no doubt from the evidence and statistics
we have studied that corruption exists on a scale which
justifies the strongest counter-measures.”—HONG KONG ADVISORY
COMMITTEE ON CORRUPTION, January, 1962
The British crown colony of Hong Kong came into existence under
circumstances bearing less resemblance to the majesty of British law
and order than they did to a territorial dispute between the Capone and
O’Banion mobs during the Chicago of the 1920s. Its founding fathers were
dope peddlers whose ability to bribe Chinese customs officials made the
traders rich and goaded the Chinese Emperor into a war that cost him the
loss of a worthless island called Hong Kong.
The Rev. George Smith, an English missionary who visited the colony
during its first five years, approached the place with the exalted
conviction that his country had “been honoured by God as the chosen
instrument for diffusing the pure light of Protestant Christianity
throughout the world.” He went ashore to discover a polyglot Gehenna with
no market for the Word.
“The lowest dregs of native society flock to the British settlement in
the hope of gain or plunder,” he wrote. “There are but faint prospects
at present of any other than either a migratory or a predatory race
being attracted to Hong Kong, who, when their hopes of gain or pilfering
vanish, without hesitation or difficulty remove elsewhere.”
The Rev. Smith was no more favorably disposed toward his fellow
countrymen. He felt the British rulers were too harsh with the Chinese,
permitting the general population to be exploited by a few Mandarins.
As for the merchants and traders, he regarded their behavior as setting
a bad example for the Chinese. Saving souls in Hong Kong, he decided,
demanded more miracles than he had at his disposal, and with considerable
relief, he transferred his missionary efforts to the more congenial
atmosphere of South China.
Other missionaries accepted the long odds against grappling successfully
with the devil in Hong Kong, but the struggle left many of them
disheartened. When the merchants and sailors were not engaged in the
opium traffic, they frequently busied themselves by purchasing Chinese
mistresses from the Tanka boat people. Many of the Eurasians of South
China were the issue of this type of transaction.
Law enforcement in the colony was a farce. The few Europeans who could
be induced to join the underpaid police force were the scourings of the
Empire, remittance men or wastrels who accepted the jobs because they did
not dare go home to England.
Householders, disgusted with the ineptness of the police, hired private
watchmen who went about at night beating bamboo drums to advertise their
presence. This noisy custom was later forbidden, and burglary, highway
robbery and harbor piracy increased. Sir John F. Davis, the colony’s
second governor, tried to persuade property owners to improve police
protection by paying more taxes for it, but the merchants demurred,
setting a precedent which was applied to many proposed improvements in
years to come. The attitude seemed to be: Progress is fine, provided one
doesn’t have to pay for it. Sir John attempted to keep track of known
criminals by obliging every colony resident to register, but was forced
to abandon the idea when the Chinese staged a three-month general strike
in protest.
Piracy, smuggling, opium-smoking, prostitution, semislave trading in
contract laborers, gambling, and graft flourished for many years,
resisting the sporadic attacks of a succession of governors. In 1858, for
the first and last time, an exceptional balance was achieved. Licenses
for the sale of liquor, the favorite Western vice, and revenue from
opium, the leading weakness of the Chinese, each brought 10,000 pounds of
income to the colony government.
Under such powerful governors as Sir Richard Graves Macdonnell (1866-72)
and Sir Arthur E. Kennedy (1872-77), the colony made significant
advances in the control of piracy and urban crime. The quality of police
protection improved and both men won the applause of local merchants by
their Draconic policy of branding, flogging and deporting law-breakers.
The Chinese Emperor and the liberal elements in the British Parliament
disapproved of the severity applied but did not intervene to stop it.
The Chinese government never ceased its opposition to the smuggling of
opium from Hong Kong, although many of its venal officials shared in
the profits of the traffic. For two decades, from the mid-1860s to the
mid-1880s, China attempted to enforce a blockade against smuggled salt
and opium, but opium continued to represent almost half its total imports.
A joint Sino-British commission agreed to place some limitation on the
trade in 1886, but the British zeal for enforcement was diluted by the
desire for continuing profits. Even after controls were repeatedly
tightened in the early 1900s, the returns held steady; in 1906, the opium
trade was valued at 5 million pounds and yielded $2 million in colony
revenue. Unfavorable world opinion gradually narrowed the trade, but the
nonmedical sale and use of the drug was not entirely banned until World
War II.
In the last several decades, the Hong Kong Police Department has outgrown
its disreputable origins and has become an efficient law-enforcement
organization. Nevertheless, the image of the colony that persists in the
imagination of many Westerners who have never been there is a cesspool of
iniquity such as the one that horrified the Rev. Smith.
Just how wicked and criminal is today’s Hong Kong?
A layman’s comparison of the crime rates of the United States and
Hong Kong for the year 1960, as published by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the Hong Kong Police Department respectively, gives an
objective picture of their relative lawlessness.
Both sets of figures are for predominantly urban areas, covering ten of
the most comparable categories of crime. The figures give the actual
number of crimes per one million population. Because of inherent
differences in the manner of classifying and reporting crimes, a margin
of error of ten percent should be allowed in their interpretation.
1960—CRIME RATES PER 1 MILLION POPULATION
CRIME CATEGORY UNITED STATES HONG KONG
Murder 55 8
Rape 74 50
Serious Assault 645 178
Burglary 1,358 157
Larceny 2,785 2,562
Forgery 234 60
Prostitution 319 527
Narcotics 289 4,677
Drunkenness 16,375 257
Robbery 361 30
Such statistics are always subject to many different interpretations,
which will not be made here. But they confirm one impression shared by
virtually everyone who has spent many nights (either at home or on the
streets) in both New York City and Hong Kong: You’re a lot safer in Hong
Kong.
The most glaring disparity between the rates is, of course, in the
comparative number of arrests for drunkenness. The American rate is more
than 60 times higher than that of Hong Kong, and it is a safe inference
that a fair share of the colony arrests for drunkenness are made among
Europeans and Americans, who comprise less than two percent of the
population. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Hong Kong drink beer,
wine or hard liquor, but a Chinese drunk in public is a rarity.
In major crimes of violence—murder, rape, serious assault and
robbery—America has a much higher crime rate. With the stated allowance
for error, the United States and Hong Kong could be considered about
equally inclined toward larceny—a legal term which covers the more
popular forms of stealing. Stealing automobiles, however, has not really
caught on in the colony; there is practically no place to hide a car
after stealing it. Bicycle theft is more common there.
Prostitution is one of the two categories in which Hong Kong has a higher
rate than America. A highly intelligent missionary who has dealt with the
problem for many years had this succinct comment:
“The problem hinges on two factors; the British Army Garrison and the
fact that Hong Kong is a recreation port for the United States Navy.
Remove these and the problem vanishes.”
For a variety of realistic reasons, this missionary does not expect
the problem to vanish, though the police and the clergy, working from
different directions, are doing their best to reduce its incidence. Both
groups recognize poverty as one major cause of prostitution that can be
fought with education and better jobs.
The comparative rates of narcotics offenses in the United States and
Hong Kong indicate that such crime is sixteen times more prevalent in
the colony than in America. They also confirm a fact recognized by every
law-enforcement unit in Hong Kong: Drugs are the No. 1 colony crime
problem. By government estimates, there are no less than 150,000, and
perhaps as many as 250,000 drug addicts in the colony. In the entire
United States there are between 45,000 and 60,000 drug addicts.
The gravity of the colony’s narcotics problem is best illustrated by the
type of addiction practiced there. Almost all addicts use either opium or
heroin, with heroin users three times more numerous than opium addicts.
The trend toward heroin has grown more powerful every year since World
War II, because the tight postwar laws against opium drove the drug
sellers to a much more potent narcotic and one that could be smuggled
more easily. Heroin is a second cousin to opium, being derived from
morphine, which, in turn, has been extracted from opium.
Heroin, commonly called “the living death,” is from 30 to 80 times
stronger than opium. An opium smoker may go along for years, suffering no
more physical damage than a heavy drinker; a heroin addict, who may be
hooked in as short a time as two weeks, sinks into physical, mental and
moral ruin within a few months.
A peculiar kind of economic injustice operates among drug addicts, who
are most often found among the poorest segments of the colony’s Chinese
population. Even in the years when the British traded openly and without
compunction in opium, they almost never became addicted to it, and today
a British addict in Hong Kong is an extreme rarity. A number of young
Americans living or visiting in the colony have picked up the habit,
probably under the impression that they are defying conventions. They, at
least, can afford the price of the rope with which they hang themselves.
This is not so for the Chinese addict, whose habit costs him an average
of $193 a year (HK $1,100), or much more than he can earn in a similar
period. Unless he has saved enough money to keep him going until the
drugs kill him, he turns to various kinds of crime to support his habit.
Opium-smoking is a cumbersome process requiring a bulky pipe, pots of the
drug, a lamp to heat it and scrapers to clean the pipe. Smoking produces
a strong odor which makes a pipe session vulnerable to police detection
and arrest. There are no opium dens in Hong Kong; the usual term is opium
divan, implying an elegance seldom encountered in the addicts’ squalid
hangouts.
Heroin, odorless and requiring no bulky apparatus, is taken in various
ways. “Chasing the dragon” is done by mixing heroin granules and base
powder in folded tinfoil, then heating it over a flame and inhaling the
fumes through a tube of rolled paper or bamboo. When a matchbox cover is
substituted for the tube, the method is called “playing the mouth organ.”
A third technique involves the placing of heroin granules in the tip of a
cigarette, which is lit and held in an upright position while the smoker
draws on it; this is known as “firing the ack-ack gun.” Needle injection,
and the smoking or swallowing of pills made by mixing heroin with other
ingredients are additional methods.