The East Hartford Gazette

Striking Contrast Posed By Refugees

BY DON O. NOEL, JR.

Hong Kong -This island city nestled on the southern flank of mainland China, is a place of striking contrast: between the stately modern homes which march over the steep hillsides and the shabby, dense refugee squatter areas crowded behind the shopping districts; between inexpensive but fixed-price shops of London and Paris couturiers, and hole-in-the-wall Chinese shops where one haggles furiously over price; and, along other things, between British freedom and a dictatorship across the border.

For this is a city of refugees. Before the war, the population of Hong Kong was 800,000; today, swollen more than three times its former size by hordes of those who fled Communist rule, it stands at more than 2,500,000, and the British have finally been forced to establish an immigration quota because they can handle no more.

The British are making every effort to alleviate the situation but progress is slow indeed. In Kowloon, the mainland side of the colony, we visited great apartment houses built for refugees. From a distance they looked modern and nice; but from closer up, we could see the small perhaps 6 x 5' room allotted to each family. And even in such crowded relocations, people are better off than they were before.

It was in one of these densely populated relocation centers that last year's riots broke out. Numbers of secret society members who claim to be Nationalists, but are in fact little more than gangsters who want to go neither to Mainland China nor to Formosa began sticking paper Nationalist flags to the walls. When told that it was against the law to affix any posters to these Government buildings, they began rioting-and the riots spread all over Kowloon. Surely the miserable condition in which these people live had more than a little to do with the extent of the riots.

The government of Hong Kong is colonial-one of the few outright colonies still existent in Asia-and there is no representative government. Nonetheless there is British justice, and a British government, and one gets the feeling that most of the people are happier that way. For one thing, the raison d'etre of the colony is primarily trade and many of the Chinese care little about government if they can trade freely. For another certainly many Chinese must feel that if they undertook a local government of the people by the people they would be inviting Communist Chinese invasion; that to a certain extent their safety lies in the fact that they are a British protectorate.

Actually, only the few islands which include Hong Kong proper, and a very small part of Kowloon, the narrow peninsula which is appended to mainland China, are British property. Some years ago, the British leased a large territory on the mainland north of Kowloon, commonly referred to as the "New Territories." This was a 99-year lease, due to expire now in 46 years.

The main reason for the lease was water supply. There is very little water on the British property and much of the New Territories is given over to reservoirs and rain-catching area. Even with this water catching area, water is in scarce supply; the friends we visited had their water turned on from 5 pm to 9 pm. daily, and during those hours had to bottle enough water to last them during the dry hours. And even at that, they considered themselves well off during a dry spell last year, when they had three hours of water every two days.

This being the case few people believe that the British colony of Hong Kong will last beyond the 46-years remaining of the New Territories lease. At the end of that period, it is likely that the Chinese government no matter what its nature at that time-will refuse to renew the lease ... and without water, the island colony could not live.

So, although no one in an official position will say so, the consensus of opinion is that the British will plan to quietly move out sometime around the year 2002. They will leave behind them, however, a flourishing community. One of the things which interested us was that there is no indication of failure to invest capital for fear of a change of government. Throughout Hong Kong, new buildings are being erected, pile drivers boom incessantly, new industries spring up, and the overall impression is one of investment and activity.

One reason for this is the prosperity of the colony. Whereas, for instance, a new building would take many decades to amortize in the United States, it is a matter of only a few years here. Housing is particularly scarce, and demands a high price. The Chinese custom is to buy an apartment, and then pay only a little bit each month to cover the cost of maintenance and repairs. I heard of one instance where a Chinese business man had gotten a bank loan to build a new building, including a movie theater, some business offices, and a lot of apartments. Before the building was completed he had sold all of the space available, and had paid the entire cost of building and a sizeable profit for himself, as well!

With all this prosperity, there is still terrible poverty in Hong Kong. Public schooling, for instance, is only for the few, and the vast majority of Chinese students in Hong Kong have no chance for even the barest education.

Moreover, the educated classes of Chinese feel little responsibility for their unfortunate neighbors. Here, as in Japan, the tradition of social responsibility, of charity and volunteered time to social organizations, is not part of the culture, and we have felt that most of the Chinese care but little about their fellow men in the crowded reclamation centers.

Some, however, do. We will be visiting a work camp, where some young Chinese will be devoting their labor to an orphanage being built in the New Territories, and we shall write next time of our experiences and impressions of that group.