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.

With the small degree of control remaining, Captain Blown plunged the Skymaster through the shoulder of a 15-foot wave as the right wing and No. 4 engine snapped off, then slammed into the middle of the next wave. The solid impact of the water caved in the cockpit windows. The tail broke off, up-ended in unison with the fuselage and headed for the sea bottom. Less than two minutes elapsed between the attack and the ditching.

Thirty seconds after hitting the water, the fuselage sank out of sight. Two of the Red fighters executed a U-turn around the wreckage before heading back to their base at Sanya, on the southern end of Hainan Island. Few of the victims had time to put on life jackets. When the cabin went down, only those washed clear of it had a chance to survive.

The eight survivors clambered or were dragged aboard the twenty-man inflated rubber raft. Captain Blown spread a weather awning over the raft and warned all passengers to keep out of sight under it in case of another attack.

Steve Wong, the Chinese radio operator, had died in the wreck. Captain Blown remembered seeing him talk into the mike all during the dive toward the sea and sending a final message, “Losing altitude, engine on fire.” The message was heard at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong and rescue operations started immediately.

Two hours later, rescue planes began to circle over the raft—Hornets, a Sunderland, Valetta, York and a French B-24, but none could land on the water. A pair of U.S. Air Force SA-16 Grumman Albatrosses were dispatched from Sangley Point in the Philippines. One of the big amphibians landed in sheltered water on the lee side of Tinhosa Island and taxied out to the raft in a perilously rough sea.

The rescuers were guided to the spot by smoke flares dropped by the French B-24. Dozens of Chinese junks wallowed and rocked on the waves at some distance from the raft, making no attempt to interfere as American fighter planes flew cover over the raft. The survivors had been on the raft for seven hours before being rescued.

Besides the three fatalities among the crew—Stewardess Rose Chen, Steve Wong and Flight Engineer G. W. Cattanach—there were seven passenger deaths, including a tea merchant, a Hong Kong University student, an American exporter and his two sons, and the owner of a Hong Kong curio shop. Captain Blown, who continued as a Cathay Pacific Airways pilot for many years, received a Queen’s Commendation for his cool-headed efforts to save the Skymaster and the lives of those aboard.

Humphrey Trevelyan, British ChargÉ d’Affaires at Peking, delivered his government’s strongly worded protest, and the Red Chinese ultimately paid $1,027,600 indemnity for the loss of the plane. No explanation of the shooting was given, except for undocumented guesses that the Communists may have been trying to kill or kidnap some person on the plane or to scare off all ships approaching her territorial limits.

The shooting prompted John Foster Dulles, American Secretary of State, to issue a hot denunciation of the “further barbarity” of the Chinese Reds. The U.S. Navy Department dispatched two aircraft carriers, the Hornet and the Philippine Sea, to join in the rescue. Their planes raced to the rescue scene, ready to start shooting if there were any Red Chinese interference. It was one of the angriest moments between the U.S. and Red China since the Korean war. It passed without further raising of American tempers, but reinforced the already intense American antipathy for Mao’s Communist state.

Less than one year later, the destruction of a second airliner in the South China Sea thrust Hong Kong into the Communist-Nationalist crossfire. A Lockheed Constellation of Air-India International took off from Kai Tak Airport, bound for the first Afro-Asian Conference at Bandoeng carrying eight Red Chinese delegates. The conference was intended to assure the uncommitted nations that Communist China had put aside its warlike ways to become an exemplar of peaceful coexistence.

There was an appalling roar as the Constellation approached Sarawak; a bomb burst in the baggage compartment, setting the aircraft afire. Pilot Captain D. K. Jatar, showing incredible skill and nerve, managed to guide the shattered plane to a jolting belly-landing at 150 miles an hour. But the impact with the sea tore the Constellation apart and it sank in moments, leaving a circle of flames on the surface. Before the radio went dead, the ship had issued an international distress call.

Eleven passengers and five crewmen, including Captain Jatar, died in the crash and explosion. Three surviving crew members drifted in a life raft for nine hours until they were picked up by the British frigate Dampier. All the Chinese delegates were among those killed, and Peking charged sabotage. The accusation proved to be well-based; the bomb had been planted by a Nationalist saboteur, employed as a cleaner by the British maintenance company at Kai Tak Airport. Hong Kong police offered a $17,500 reward for his arrest, but he escaped to Taiwan on another airplane.

The Hong Kong government issued a warrant for the bomber’s arrest, but the Nationalist authorities replied that they had no legal basis for his extradition to the colony. There the matter rested, with the abiding hatred between Peking and Taipeh continuing as before.

Each of the sea and air incidents threatened the security of the colony to some degree, but none rocked its internal structure with the earthquake power of the Double Ten riots of October, 1956. No other crisis since World War II has presented such a frontal challenge to its ability to preserve law and order. Three days of savage guerrilla warfare raged through thickly congested streets, and when the fight was over, the British administration had had the fright of its life.

Statistics convey none of the heat of these bloody battles, but they measure a few of their dimensions: 59 people killed, 500 injured, nearly $1,000,000 in property damage, 6,000 arrests, 1,241 prison sentences and four executions for murder. Nearly 3,000 police and several army battalions were engaged in subduing the rioters. From east to west, the riots extended across eleven miles of Upper Kowloon and the New Territories, and were marked by fifty-four skirmishes between mobs and the uniformed forces.

If the genesis of the riots were to be narrowed down to a single proximate cause, it would have to be something as trivial as an argument over a few paper flags pasted on a concrete wall. Physically, that was where they started, but their true origin goes back at least three centuries.

The riots took their name from the common designation of a patriotic holiday on October 10, the tenth day of the tenth month, marking the anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911. In Hong Kong, it is preceded by the October 1 celebration of the birthday of Red China. Each holiday gave Nationalist or Communist sympathizers an opportunity to explode strings of firecrackers, hold rallies and fly their national flags. On both days, police were out in full force to prevent riots between the opposing Chinese groups, and they managed to keep the lid down fairly well until 1956.

The October 1 holiday in 1956 passed without undue commotion and October 10 began with no indication of Communist violence. Nationalist flags were displayed by refugees all over the colony, particularly in the heavily populated resettlement estates of Upper Kowloon. The refugees were predominantly pro-Nationalist, having been driven from their homeland by the Reds. After years of exile and grinding poverty, many of them were steeped in bitterness and yearning for revenge against the Communists.

The Triad gangs, whose members played a key part in the Double Ten riots, had been established in China three centuries ago as a patriotic society dedicated to the overthrow of the foreign Manchus who dethroned the native Ming Dynasty. Their professed ideals slowly rotted away and they devolved into a band of thugs, living on protection rackets, shake-downs of street peddlers and petty criminals, enforced by fear and strong-arm brutality. Since World War I, crime has become their primary business and their patriotism survives only as a front.

On October 10, 1956, pro-Nationalist residents of the Shek Kip Mei Resettlement Estate began to take down the paper flags they had pasted on the concrete walls of the housing blocks. Housing officials had objected that the pasted flags were difficult to remove after the Double Ten holiday was over, and the tenants, who could still fly flags from poles or ropes, accepted the cleanup job unprotestingly.

At Li Cheng Uk, a resettlement estate about a quarter of a mile to the northwest of Shek Kip Mei, housing officials themselves removed Nationalist flags and symbols stuck on the walls. It was early in the morning of the Double Tenth, when an unfriendly crowd of about 400 gathered quickly and demanded that the flags be restored. Police were called, but the crowd swelled to more than 2,000 by early afternoon and its demands became more extravagant. Impatient for action, some of the crowd attacked two resettlement officials, beating them severely. Police units, hurrying to help the injured men, were met with a barrage of flying bottles. They replied with tear gas and the mob, turning its anger on the police, showered them with rocks. A resettlement office was set afire but police reinforcements succeeded in dispersing the mob. By midafternoon, with two persons arrested and four injured, peace appeared to have been restored.

Right after the dinner hour, a newly formed mob at Li Cheng Uk renewed the rock-throwing attacks on police. Nationalist flags were unfurled and a shouting mass of rioters charged into police lines. Four riot units of 240 men were called out and the strengthened force threw a cordon around six blocks while a sporadic exchange of rocks and tear gas continued. The area enclosed by the cordon became relatively quiet, but new disorders broke out along its southern edge. Police vehicles were attacked, and members of Triads were sighted in the center of the commotion.

Rioting became general and violent by 10:30 P.M. and police set up roadblocks on main routes into the area. The mobs altered their tactics, splitting into small fighting squads that pounded a segment of the police lines with a swift, sharp attack, then scattered and ran before police could bring up reserves. Within a few minutes, the attack squads would re-form on another block and hit police lines again. As the evening advanced, the riot zone kept expanding into other parts of Kowloon. Police units were alerted on Hong Kong Island to forestall possible riots there.

Police were only one of the mob targets. A fire engine returning from a minor blaze near the Kowloon resettlement estates was bombarded with bricks, bottles and chunks of concrete. The engine driver, struck on the head by a flying object, lost control of the truck and it plunged erratically into a crowd, killing three and injuring five. Ambulances were stoned as they arrived to pick up the casualties. An Auxiliary Fire Service vehicle was dumped over and set on fire. Hordes of rioters swarmed into the area, more police were summoned and a four-hour battle ensued.

The looting phase of the riots began with an attack on a bakery in the heart of the disturbed area. After smashing the bakery windows and setting it afire, rioters turned their rock-and-stone batteries on firemen called to put out the flames. Two floors of the building were destroyed before the firemen could extinguish the blaze. Meanwhile, rioters went berserk on the streets, looting and burning shops until the massed strength of police laboriously regained control of the neighborhood.

Another battle was fought in the crowded streets of Mongkok. Rocks were dropped on the police from balconies while Triad gangs embarked on the looting of shops. Marauding gangs roamed the Kowloon streets down to Austin Road, the northern edge of the tourist and luxury shopping section, before police hammered them into submission.

General restoration of order in Kowloon was still far off. October 11 was only a half-hour old when police learned that a mob infiltrated by Triad gangsters was preparing to set fire to a pro-Communist private school. Police sent to investigate were pelted with rocks and forced to withdraw with five men injured. A riot unit used tear gas to pen the rioters inside the resettlement buildings while other police went to the school. They found looters and arsonists busily at work and arrested eleven men.

About 3:45 A.M., hoodlums became active near Kai Tak Airport, a mile and a half east of Tai Hang Tung, wrecking a traffic pagoda.

Sunrise on October 11 brought a lull, but at 10 A.M., there was renewed rioting at Li Cheng Uk. Triad thugs peddled Nationalist flags by threatening to beat up anyone who refused to buy. Looting and mob barricades again confronted police who had been hard-hit by injuries.

One mob launched a full-scale attack on the Sham Shui Po police station, but were repelled by gunfire and scattered into the side streets when an armored car pursued them. Mobs of ever-increasing size were fast-moving and elusive, and tear gas did little more than drive them to another location where they attacked again. They lighted bonfires in the streets and then heaved rocks at the firemen called to extinguish them.

The Kowloon rioters displayed no signs of a unified battle plan, nor any concerted push toward a strategic objective. But their actions revealed a consistent pattern of criminality after the looting and extortion began, confirming the police belief that Triads were in control. Police decided to shoot to kill, but realized that even this last-ditch measure would be useless unless they deployed their units to surround the rioters and take them prisoner. Shortly after noon of October 11—and very late by many people’s judgment—three battalions of the Hong Kong army garrison were thrown into the fight.

With army battalions in action, the mob spirit began to die down throughout Kowloon by evening. A curfew was imposed, cross-harbor ferry service suspended, and the main impetus of the Kowloon riots came to an end.

Rigid enforcement of the curfew slowly cleared the streets of bystanders, but failed to drive the active rioters to cover. Looting and stoning of police persisted in Mongkok until after midnight, when riot guns and tear gas finally halted it. Strong-arm gangs armed with rocks, hammers, and iron bars prowled through eastern Kowloon, extorting money from shopkeepers, looting factories and battling police. Three rioters were killed and more than 400 arrested before the plundering was checked.

Looting and arson continued for the third day, October 12, at many places in Kowloon. The mass riots of the first two days were replaced by a merciless street war between bands of gangsters and the uniformed services of the colony. Three looters were shot to death in a raid on a provision shop in Mongkok. Firemen, ambulance crews and practically every man in a uniform was stoned or beaten if he ventured into a riot area.

On the afternoon of the 12th, police began dragnet raids on the hideouts of rioters and looters, taking 1,170 prisoners. The next day, raids at Li Cheng Uk by police and military units took 1,000 prisoners, and 700 others were rounded up at Tai Hang Tung.

On the morning of October 14, the curfew was lifted in Kowloon and most of the army units were relieved. But a night curfew continued for three more nights in northwestern Kowloon.

The day after the Kowloon riots erupted, a related but different kind of rioting broke out in Tsuen Wan, a New Territories factory town five and one-half miles west of Li Cheng Uk. In this area of textile and enamelware factories, most of the workers lived in company dormitories; physically close, but divided into intensely hostile pro- and anti-Communist unions.

Tsuen Wan had experienced some friction over the refusal of factory owners to display Nationalist flags on plant buildings during the Double Ten holiday, although pro-Nationalist workers could display the flags in their dormitories. No open protest was made until the afternoon of the next day, when a mob gathered outside a cotton mill and insisted that Nationalist flags be shown. The company acceded, and even granted the crowd leaders a small amount of money.

But the right-wing unions were in no mood for peaceful solutions that same evening when they launched a series of raids on Communist union offices; they looted and burned the offices and beat some leftist workers so savagely that five of them died. Sixty other leftist union members were collared by a mob and dragged off to a Nationalist rally where they were kicked and punched until many were unconscious. Meanwhile, another group of right-wing unionists continued to raid Communist union offices, assaulting any members they could find. Army troops were called to restore order, and their heavy vehicles crashed through mob barricades to remove the injured and clamp a strict curfew on Tsuen Wan.

One mile south of the town, mobs were still on a rampage, attacking a canning factory and setting it on fire. Four other factories on the outskirts of Tsuen Wan were besieged by mobs carrying Nationalist flags. Their demands were identical; either the plant would put out Nationalist flags and pay protection to the mob, or the place would be burned down. Management officials hastened to comply.

Several large textile mills were also favored with mob visits and a peremptory demand that they fire all pro-Red workers. Four miles west of Tsuen Wan, a Nationalist union group combined forces with a Triad gang, looted a textile factory, set fire to an automobile, stole a factory truck and withdrew after having their demands satisfied by management. Five houses and shops identified with Communist interests were invaded and wrecked.

The Tsuen Wan curfew was extended to surrounding areas and remained in force until October 16 while police and the army locked horns with the Nationalist rioters. Left-wingers were not an immediate problem, most of them having fled to the hills for their lives. But the rightist demonstrators were tough; they were disciplined fighters, ably led and guided by whistle-blast commands. Eight persons were killed, 109 seriously injured and 684 arrested before the rioters capitulated.

Long after the restoration of law and order, fear continued to keep workers away from their jobs. Full production did not resume at factories and mills in the Tsuen Wan area until early in November.

When the last of the Double Ten disorders ended, the hard-pressed colony government had a chance to assess events. Most of the property damaged by mobs belonged to Communists or their sympathizers, but Nationalist vengeance was by no means the only reason for its destruction; the longer the riots continued, the more inescapable became the conclusion that they were directed by criminals bent on manipulating patriotic emotions to enrich themselves.

The Double Ten riots did more than weaken the prestige of the Triads, whose leaders were either arrested or deported; it helped to illustrate the futility of waging a street war in Hong Kong over the Nationalist-Communist issue. Partisanship toward either side still burns strongly among the older Chinese, but it is a dwindling flame. Younger people, and many Chinese intellectuals within the colony, seem indifferent or hostile to both camps. Practically no one wants to return to Red China, and Taiwan had shown little inclination to welcome Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong until the border rush of May, 1962.

The turmoil occasioned by the Double Ten riots was succeeded by a period of comparative calm between Red China and the colony. But it ended in 1958, when the Chinese Communists clamped tight restrictions on inshore fishing by boats from Hong Kong. The Reds, perennially belligerent over the suspected invasion of their territorial limits, demanded that any boats fishing in their waters must have a Communist registration in addition to their colony registry. The registration also involved a Communist share of the fisherman’s catch, and Hong Kong boats resented the gouge. The apparent solution was to keep their craft out of Communist waters.

The Reds made the problem more complex by invading Hong Kong waters on numerous patrol swoops to seize Hong Kong junks. The first of these came in October, 1958, when Red patrol boats grabbed several junks near Po Toi Island, on the southern edge of colony waters. In December, a Communist gunboat fired on junks in colony waters, killing two fishermen and injuring several others. A month later, a Chinese gunboat crossed into colony waters and captured two fishing boats with six persons aboard. In May, 1959, an armed Communist tug pushed nine miles into Hong Kong waters to round up a pair of large fishing junks.

In self-defense, many Hong Kong fishermen abandoned inshore fishing, and ventured much farther out to sea. Without intending to, the Reds helped to stimulate the mechanization of the colony’s fishing fleet and improve its efficiency.

The colonial administration at Hong Kong carefully avoids comment on the Nationalist-Communist issue. It can, of course, initiate no foreign policy of its own, but must keep precisely to the line set down by the British government. It is expected to get along as best it can with both Red China and Taiwan, and leave the high-level thundering to London.

While the colony’s officials are well aware that the United States and other Western powers are using Hong Kong as an observation post on Red China, and that both Red China and Taiwan have their corps of spies in the colony, they take no official cognizance of such activities until they become too conspicuous. Unfortunately, they often do. Toward the end of 1961, the colony had 21 Nationalist spies in custody, including a former leader of guerrilla forces in Southeast Asia.

Even more embarrassing are the cases in which one of the colony’s officials turns out to be a foreign spy. On October 2, 1961, the colony government arrested John Chao-ko Tsang, an Assistant Superintendent of Police and one of its most promising career men, and deported him to Red China on November 30. The case created a sensation, for Tsang had the highest post of any colony official ever involved in an espionage case.

With its customary delicacy in matters affecting Red China, the government announced only that Tsang was being deported as an alien. Fourteen other “aliens” were rounded up for questioning in the case, and four of them were sent across the border at Lo Wu with John Tsang. Tsang was later rumored to be in charge of public security for the Reds at Canton.

Tsang’s arrest was pure luck. A Chinese detective returning from Macao on another case noticed a man dressed as a common laborer take a bundle of $100 banknotes from one pocket and put it into another. The detective questioned him about the large amount of money, but found his answers pretty thin. He was accordingly hauled to a police station, questioned further and searched. A letter found on him was eventually traced to John Tsang. Unofficially, the letter was said to contain instructions from a Communist espionage cell in Macao.

The former Assistant Superintendent was thirty-eight years old, and so intelligent and popular that he looked to be headed for a top place in the department. Born in China, he had come to Hong Kong before the Reds ruled the mainland, joined the police in 1948 and rose rapidly from the ranks. He had gone to Cambridge University in 1960 for advanced studies, married while there, and returned to the colony in mid-1961. He was then one of the highest-ranking Chinese officers in the department.

The nature of Tsang’s work gave him an expert’s knowledge of the colony’s defenses and internal security, information of obvious value to the Reds. His associates in the police force still doubt that he came to Hong Kong as a spy, believing that he turned Communist after he became established in the colony. His wife and mother remained in Hong Kong after his deportation.

The Tsang case was also an embarrassment to Hong Kong Chinese who aspired to high office in the colony. It bolstered the anti-Chinese bias of old-school colonialists, giving them an opportunity to say, “See! When you give those Chinese a good job, they sell you out.”

The stream of political abuse which Peking had directed at Hong Kong for a decade was superseded in 1960 by a stream of fresh water flowing at the rate of 5 billion gallons a year. On November 15, 1960, the two governments signed an agreement under which Red China was to tap its newly built Sham Chun reservoir, two miles north of the colony border, to provide an auxiliary supply for Hong Kong. The colony put up its own pumping station and laid ten miles of steel pipeline, four feet in diameter, to convey the water to its own large reservoir at Tai Lam, near Castle Peak. The water began flowing in December, 1960, and the arrangements for receiving and paying for it have proceeded smoothly since then.

No one has assessed the symbolic or political significance of the deal, which meets only a small fraction of the colony’s water needs, but it disconcerts many American tourists.

“Do you mean to tell me I’ve been drinking Communist water?” they ask. Most of the food they ate in Hong Kong probably came from Red China, but water is different. Some of them eye it suspiciously, as if they expected it to have a reddish hue or to contain traces of poison. The water is purified and filtered in Hong Kong, however, and thus far it has maintained a crystal-clear neutrality.

The life-or-death issue between Red China and Hong Kong is one that may not be decided until June 30, 1997, the termination date of the New Territories lease. If it is not renewed, more than 90 percent of the colony’s land will revert to China, leaving Great Britain with Hong Kong Island, most of the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island.

If China refuses to renew, as she has a clear legal right to do under the terms of the 99-year lease, she will get much more than the land itself. With it will come the colony’s only modern airport, practically all its productive farmland, its chief industrial centers at Tsuen Wan and Kwun Tong, by far the greater part of its reservoirs and water-supply system, from one-third to one-half its population and all its mineral resources except a few quarries and clay pits.

“It would be folly to try to foresee what will happen in thirty-five years,” said one of the colony’s principal officials in 1962. “In this age of fission and fusion, it’s impossible to see even five years ahead.”

On one point, there is little doubt among the colony’s officials: without the New Territories, Hong Kong would be untenable.

Outside of the colony, the 1997 deadline looms like doom; inside, it is just another of those far-off worries, like an epidemic or a catastrophic typhoon. Everyone knows it is coming; meanwhile, they go on making money, putting up new factories and hotels and planning gigantic public works.

Some of the colony’s leading businessmen expect the Chinese Communists, or any other power ruling the mainland in 1997, to drive a tough bargain for the New Territories and then renew the lease for another 99 years.

Red China, which holds all the cards, hasn’t tipped its hand.