Putting the Squeeze on Hong Kong

...Raise high the great flag of patriotism...

...The People's Republic may go on earning more than $400 million a year —close to half its badly needed foreign exchange—by supplying the colony with the bulk of its foodstuffs and low-cost textiles, but the sanctity of Hong Kong, the frosted window through which China and the West have exchanged baleful glances for 18 years, has somehow been immutably violated by the recent Communist-led riots and demonstrations...

...The British authorities have been unable to win the confidence of these wretched thousands, who have only to look across the harbor at the wealthy homes on the "Peak" of Hong Kong island to see what they are missing...

...China's earnings from Hong Kong are a drop in the bucket...

...They have refused to countenance the Communists' demands and showed far more skill than the Portuguese in suppressing the mob...

...No longer can aging British authorities, accustomed to ruling with benevolent despotism, repeat so confidently the axiom that China's profits from Hong Kong preclude its demanding the colony's return...

...The general view was that the Chinese Communists wanted to humiliate the British as they had the Portuguese earlier this year after demonstrations in the enclave of Macao, 40 miles away...

...First, analysts noted, China was slow to "protest" against the British...

...Daniel Scott, a free-lance journalist, reports Far Eastern developments from his base in Hong Kong...

...For all the proud boasts by the colony's Leftist press and labor organizations, observers have never been quite sure since the riots began of just how much Peking wanted them to continue...

...You do hear stories of waiters who became company directors, but most of Hong Kong's well-to-do Chinese had more conventional beginnings: They inherited some money, perhaps a business, from their parents, or were able to flee with their wealth before the Communist victory...

...The fury of the Chinese campaign suggested the Communists were determined to gain some concessions...

...This time they are throwing rocks, presumably shouting Maoist slogans, running away from tear gas attacks, only to regroup a few minutes later...

...You sense the slum dwellers" hopeless hatred as you wander through the crowded neighborhoods...

...Representatives of large British companies—Jardine Matheson, Butterfleld & Swire, among others—frequently visit China on trade missions...

...In Peking's view, the Communists of Hong Kong have always been pawns in the struggle to get the most out of the colony while keeping the British rulers in check...

...This would relieve London of the embarrassment of answering China's protest, and Peking would not feel slighted if its protest was ignored...

...Government mediation, for instance, often impresses workers as official pressure forcing them to bow to demands of money-hungry companies...

...They do not censor news, they do not bar Chinese from certain types of business...

...the intellectuals run Leftist schools and newspapers, bookshops and clubs...

...There is, moreover, a certain arrogance about British colonialism in Hong Kong that slowly encourages sentiment against it...

...Like an imbecile relative or an uncouth in-law, Hong Kong for years was charily ignored by China's leaders, whether they represented Chairman Mao Tse-tung or his archenemy, the blackguard "revisionist" President Liu Shao-chi...

...The Communists want to show they can make the British do what they want...

...When Red Guards ransacked the home of a British diplomat in Shanghai, some Hong Kong newspapers speculated the attack was part of a carefully-devised plan to give Britain an excuse for a "protest" of its own...

...A LITTLE 'WAR OF LIBERATION' Putting the Squeeze on Hong Kong By Daniel Scott Hong Kong This British Crown Colony on China's southern coast is easily the most unsightly sore on the sensitive skin of the "Great Cultural Revolution...

...Through years of manipulating both the local Communists and the British elite, the mainlanders have managed to develop a semblance of loyalty among a potpourri of petit bourgeois merchants, labor leaders and intellectuals...

...Raise high the great Red flag of Mao Tse-tung's thought...

...If China were determined to take over Hong Kong without sending troops across the border, it could easily paralyze the colony by stopping food shipments and ordering a general strike...

...Hong Kong is good for some people," said a languid youth in T-shirt and blue pants, staring vacantly through an apartment window, "but not for most...

...Once successful, however, they cannot help craving more of the charmed life that Hong Kong offers its privileged inhabitants—the British officials, Western businessmen, diplomats and wealthy Chinese who form the colony's Establishment...

...Chinese-owned companies flourish in virtually every sector of Hong Kong's economy, but the real powers are a dozen or so English firms, some of which originally made their money in the last century on the opium trade with China...

...The huge apartment blocks rise tall, white and modern from the barren ground, and the Chinese living in tin-roofed huts on the hills behind compete for the chance to live in them...

...In a colony where the rich are steadily acquiring wealth at the expense of the poor, the lower classes have little chance of joining the relatively small middle group of successful bourgeois Chinese...

...One Leftist newspaper warned that Chinese policies toward Hong Kong "have changed a great deal" and that the colony would be "treated as a battlefield" unless the administration accepted the demands of a local "anti-persecution committee...

...While the colony's labor force averages far higher earnings than the proletariat on the mainland, the workers feel they are essentially victims of grinding, capitalist exploitation...

...British businessmen can afford to be patronizing toward "naive" Americans who foolishly support Taiwan and fail to "understand" the mainland...

...they are not enough to make us stop our struggle," said a Leftist newspaper...

...And they try to provide a basic education for anyone who wants it...

...The British have not only tolerated the constant Chinese threat, but in some cases have developed a remarkably courteous relationship with Peking...

...The moderates, according to this theory, wanted to give verbal support to the rioters while the extremists, diehard supporters of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, preferred direct action against the Hong Kong authorities...

...As the riots grew in violence, even spreading to the central business district on Hong Kong island, loudspeakers on the Bank of China building blared encouragement and threatened the local police with "trials by people's courts...

...The British authorities have reacted with considerably more fortitude than the Portuguese...

...Authorities here pride themselves on the "resettlement estates" built for hundreds of thousands of Chinese over the past 15 years...

...Chinese should not attack Chinese...

...Hong Kong will be around a while longer," said a local official...

...Down with capitalism, down with imperialism...

...In any case, China has reminded everyone that it can take over Hong Kong any time it wishes...

...The colony's more advanced schools turn out thousands of polite young men and women to fill the offices of large companies...

...The British are not dictators in the conventional sense...

...Nor could he ignore the fact that the colony's bourgeois prosperity was due to the desperate opportunism of People's China, which needs it for economic survival...

...But no Chinese politician could readily forget that Hong Kong had grown from a colony of 700,-000 persons in 1949 to a flourishing, free-enterprising, thoroughly materialistic haven for nearly four million...

...Then, later, you see other young men, their mouths contorted in anger...

...Some observers speculated that the Leftist campaign might fizzle out with a face-saving statement allowing both sides to claim victory...

...Like other "wars of liberation," the revolution in Hong Kong was born in the slums...

...The English-language newspapers often give better play to statements denouncing riots than to the riots themselves...

...We will handle Hong Kong in due course," was the stock reply of Chinese diplomats when asked why China let it exist in complete opposition to the principles of Marxism-Leninism, let alone the militant brand espoused by Mao and his followers...

...But it will never be the same...

...Another estimate is that the Communists in Peking were actually divided among themselves as to how much they should help their Hong Kong compatriots...

...Perhaps purposefully, though, there are openings for only a handful of students who aspire to a higher education...

...Hong Kong depended, at least until the riots, on the delicate balance between these British and Chinese financial and mercantile interests...

...Hong Kong is Chinese soil," said a woman's strident voice in Cantonese, the local dialect...

...Indeed , the British government might well be accused of providing Hong Kong with certain amenities so residents will be more inclined to support the system and, hopefully, less likely to rebel...

...If nothing else, they might force the British to forbid Americans from using Hong Kong as a rest and recreation center for the Seventh Fleet and troops from Vietnam...

...The merchants are responsible for trade with the mainland...

...Communist-owned banks and stores displayed signs with slogans from Mao Tse-tung, and the local Communist press carried an editorial exhorting...

...Lower schools teach thousands more enough reading and arithmetic to perform skilled and semi-skilled jobs in factories...

...Perhaps the most important spokesman in the colony for this point of view has been the Far Eastern Economic Review, a weekly journal whose editors have always been eligible for visas to China...

...then, when it finally did protest three days later, its objections were included in a "statement," not an official "protest...

...Blood debts will be repaid...

...Thus, the local press reports all the news, but it has never exposed corruption and influence-peddling in government, inefficiency in jails and hospitals, or other examples of official malfeasance...

...you're told, are the Communist cliches on their lips, and you understand why they look upon Maoism as the only alternative...

...The committee demanded, among other things, that the government free several hundred persons arrested during the riots and apologize for having committed "sanguinary Fascist atrocities...

...They would not consider suppressing Communist activity lest China itself react unpleasantly...

...The result was a compromise: The Communist leaders in Hong Kong were assured they would have Peking's backing for strikes, violent demonstrations and wordmongering, but not for more drastic measures affecting the livelihood of the colony...

...Hong Kong belongs to China...

...Even if the Communists are not successful this time, observers believe they will try again in the near future...

...Predictably, after the riots began the editor declared he was certain they were home-grown and not officially sanctioned by Peking...

...the labor leaders try to extend union influence in the colony's vital industries and services...

...Even the mass rally in Peking, attended by Premier Chou En-lai and three other Politburo members, was construed by some as a pro forma exhibition of little significance...

...Fight to the end...

...The irony of the local Communists' revolt against British authority is that it is perhaps the only "war of liberation" not getting wholehearted support from Peking...

...But the fact is the estates are as hot, crowded and filthy as their equivalents in Harlem or Chicago's South Side...

...Hundreds of businesses have reaped fortunes for their owners here in recent years while paying their help an average salary of $1 a day...

...Others were not so sure...

...After observing the conventions of liberal democracy, however, the British Establishment constricts Chinese development in Hong Kong as surely, if not as cruelly, as any dictatorial power...

...you feel the young men's calculating glances, the weary, resigned looks of old men in black cotton pants or pajamas...

...Similarly, politicians in Peking cannot continue turning a deaf ear to complaints that Hong Kong is an insult to Communist precepts...

...The imperialists are mistaken if they think otherwise...

...and every year the papers carry reports of students who committed suicide after failing the difficult examination for the "school leaving certificate," the equivalent of a high school diploma...

...And the Hong Kong government, impartial as it may appear in a single labor dispute, has shown its bias by taxing companies only 15 per cent of their profits...

...While publishing numerous factual reports on the mainland, the Review has usually avoided criticizing China and generally seems optimistic about its future...

...Whatever Peking's long-range plans for Hong Kong may have been, it is now in the midst of a diminutive "war of liberation" that has thoroughly shaken backers on both sides of the Bamboo Curtain...

...China could also cut off the flow of water it has supplied for the past three years from reservoirs just inside its border...