Main Door to Communist China: A remarkably unfrightened place

THE British Crown Colony of Hong Kong is a packed and pulsating place with a rich but brief past in a singularly unpredictable life expectancy. It is the last true colony of size and importance in all Asia, and it perches in incongruous complacency on the coast of Communist China like a fat canary on the shoulder of a hungry tomcat.

In numbers, Hong Kong's 2,400,000 Chinese, speaking every dialect of the mainland, dominate the colony, but a few thousand English-speaking whites run it. The mellow beat of wooden clogs on pavement, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the wail of radios tuned to Chinese opera, the brays of hawkers and cries of countless babies, all insist on its Chineseness--but the eye is reminded, by the flap of the Union Jack and the crisp gesture of a traffic cop, that here, as nowhere else in Asia, British "law and order" yet prevail.

Street stalls and numberless shops vend glowing jade, laces, lovingly carved woods and ivories from the China mainland (only a mile away), roasted whole pigs, tin bathtubs, hollowed-tree coffins, ancient cures compounded of dried sea horses, centipedes, lizards and snakes. Yet more than 1,500 workshops and factories, many of them new and equipped with modern Western machinery, pour forth a cascade of flashlights, rubber shoes, bicycles and cheap cottons for the marketplaces of Southeast Asia. The colony consists of 391 sq. mi.; most of it--a 356-sq.-mi. mainland area called the New Territories--is leased from China until 1997. But the overwhelming mass of people live on Manhattan-sized Hong Kong Island and the small Kowloon peninsula.

Traffic rolls in constant cacophony through gullylike streets between stolid Victorian houses of commerce. In the great harbor, junks with patched sails pick their way among British and U.S. warships, freighters and tankers of a score or more of flags. From the Peak, the British name for the range of hills on Hong Kong Island, houses of the rich and the merely prosperous give grace to a prospect that leads many a world traveler to argue that Hong Kong surpasses Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, or San Francisco as the world's most beautiful seaport. Beneath the Peak stand perhaps the world's most crowded slums, where as many as 40 may live in a space 18 ft. by 14 ft., and along some of the poorer, barren slopes, there are great barnacle collections of kindling-and-paper shacks, where 200,000 squatters live.

For a long time Hong Kong thought its congestion temporary, but now it accepts the fact that the crowds have no place else to go. More than 1,000,000 (no one really knows how many) have rolled across the Chinese border since the Reds began rising to power. They ask only freedom and often get little more ($1 a day is considered a good wage in Hong Kong). Recently Wen Ko, a cultured former government official from Hunan, was crushed to death by a truck--while shoveling dirt as an earth coolie. To keep the flow of immigration under control, Hong Kong put into effect last March a quota that, in effect, admits one Chinese for every one who returns to China. The colonial service does its best to take care of them all, but in almost every fortnightly health report, the government finds it necessary to report: "Dumped bodies, 18 . . . 22 ... 25," in reference to humans found dead in the streets.

Hong Kong is a battleground of Communists and anti-Communists who maneuver and plot and occasionally murder each other under the eye of a government that is alert to it all but prefers to pretend that none of it goes on. Hong Kong is the world's main door to Communist China and the only ready haven from it, and partly for this reason, it is a colony where political rights hardly exist. It is ruled by a British governor with powers that to all effects are absolute, and a vast majority of its inhabitants are quite happy to leave it that way. It is an example of what human beings will pay for security and order in an insecure and disorderly world.

Hong Kong relies on Red China for much of its food supply. Communists hold strong positions in Hong Kong unions of shipyard, transport, electrical, gas and water-system workers, and there are indications, never said aloud, that the Reds also have some strength in the police. They are busy within the school system.

Since Hong Kong and its trade-hungry businessmen take the official position that Communists as such are not bad or dangerous (the Hong Kong banking and trading concerns were in great part responsible for Britain's early recognition of the Peking regime), officials are circumspect about cracking down. Communists openly circulate their publications and run their businesses (the tallest building in Hong Kong, by 20 ft., is a Communist bank). Nevertheless, the police arrest and arraign and deport suspected Red troublemakers before a lawyer can say habeas corpus. The popular view among official and unofficial Hong Kong is that the Communists are strong but not strong enough to kick up the kind of violence they precipitated last spring in Singapore. They may be able to terrorize many Hong Kong Chinese, but they have not converted them: for what it is worth, Hong Kong displays more Chinese Nationalist flags on Oct. 10 (Independence Day) than Red flags on Oct. 1, the Communist National Day.

A Fraction of the Past

Hong Kong, its banks and godowns, was founded for "the China trade." But in the first eight months of last year, imports from Red China represented 23% of Hong Kong's imports, and exports to China represented a relatively minor 8% of all the colony's exports. This abrupt decline began with the trade embargo during the Korean war, promoted by the U.S. and accepted by a reluctant Britain and a reluctant Hong Kong. But the decline also reflects Red China's own increasing reliance on overland trade with Soviet Russia and the satellites.

Since the U.N. laid down embargo rules in 1951, most Hong Kong trade with China has been strictly legal.

Hong Kong has had to make over its economy and has succeeded surprisingly well. Early Chinese refugees brought their money with them, and today operate many of the white factories and home-workshop networks that employ some 315,000 Hong Kong men and women. At first a hotel owner hesitated before renovating a wing or papering over the flaked walls of a grand ballroom, wondering whether there would be time to amortize his investment. A prospering Chinese plastics maker deliberated whether to plow back his profits into his business or to save the cash for a future flight. But increasingly, the decision has been to take the risk. New office buildings, new houses rise. As a depository for the wealth of insecure rich men, Hong Kong ranks high--a steady flow of funds comes in from all over Asia for investment (in housing, factories, public utilities) and safekeeping.

For a time, Hong Kong was a frightened place. Today Hong Kong is remarkably unfrightened. Its citizens, if they talk about it at all, exchange the mutual confidence that the big Red cat will not try to gulp down Britain's fat little Asian canary unless it is prepared to take on Britain and the whole Western world in war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.