From the end of World War II until the fall of 1949 the mainland of China rumbled with the clash of contending armies. Thousands of Chinese, uprooted and dispossessed by the Nationalist-Communist struggle, streamed southward across the Hong Kong border in a steady procession.

The orderly nature of the exodus ended when Mao Tse-tung, having beaten and dispersed the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, turned his guns on all people suspected of thinking or acting against the People’s Republic of China. What had been a slow withdrawal became a headlong flight for life.

For six months after the Reds took over the mainland, Hong Kong clung to its free-immigration policy. Then it reluctantly adopted a formula of “one in, one out”—accepting one immigrant if another person returned to China. But the refugee flow continued at a reduced rate in spite of land and sea patrols on both sides of the international boundary.

In 1956, the British relaxed immigration rules for seven months, hoping the refugees would go home. Instead, 56,000 new refugees arrived from China, and the colony reimposed its restrictions.

The Chinese side of the frontier unexpectedly opened in May, 1962, and 70,000 refugees dashed for Hong Kong. The colony, alarmed and already desperately overcrowded, strengthened and extended its boundary fence and returned all but 10,000 of the new arrivals to China.

This race for freedom aroused the Free World’s tardy compassion. The United States moved to admit 6,000 Hong Kong refugees, including some who had applied for admission as long ago as 1954. Taiwan, Brazil, and Canada also expressed willingness to accept a limited number. Until this change of heart, Taiwan had taken only 15,000 colony refugees, and the United States only 105 a year. None of these offers will materially reduce the number of Hong Kong refugees, whose total is officially estimated at 1,000,000. Unofficial estimates set the total around 1,500,000.

Whatever the total within this range, it stuns the imagination. The well-intentioned observer who has come to sympathize finds himself backing away from this amorphous mass, unable to isolate or grasp its human content of individual misery, privation and heartache. He wants to help, as he would do if he saw a child struck down in the road, but when the whole landscape is a panorama of tragedy, he hardly knows where to begin.

There are a dozen landscapes like that in Hong Kong; the hills of Upper Kowloon with thousands of flimsy shacks perched uncertainly on their steep granite faces; the heights above Causeway Bay where squatter settlements flow down the mountainside like a glacier of rubbish; the rooftops of Wanchai, maggoty with close-packed sheds; the rotting tenements of the Central District strewn in terraces of misery across the lower slopes of Victoria Peak; the sink-hole of the old Walled City in Kowloon with its open sewers and such dark, narrow alleys that its inhabitants seem to be groping around in a cave with a few holes punched through the roof.

Yet there are people in the colony who have chosen to cut their way through this thick tangle of indiscriminate suffering. Going beyond that first fragile desire to help and the secondary conclusion that no one person can do anything effective against a problem of such vast dimensions, they have learned to stand in the path of an avalanche and direct traffic. They have opened a way to solve the refugee problem by the simple process of starting somewhere. Ultimate solutions, in the sense of housing and feeding all the refugees by giving them productive jobs in a free economy, lie many years and millions of dollars away. Meanwhile, people of courage and resolution, dealing with individual human needs instead of wallowing in statistics, have achieved wonders in improving the lot of Hong Kong’s refugees. Who they are and what they have done offer the real key to Hong Kong’s problem of people.

Sister Annie Margareth Skau, a Norwegian missionary nurse of towering physical and spiritual stature, began her work among Hong Kong’s refugees with invaluable postgraduate training. She herself was a refugee from China, driven out by the Reds.

Born in Oslo, she studied nursing at its City Hospital and decided to become a “personal Christian,” dedicating her life to labor as a missionary nurse of the Covenanters, or Mission Covenant Church of Norway. The work was certain to be arduous, for the Covenanters sent their workers to such remote corners of the world as Lapland, the Congo or the interior of China. Annie, who has an almost mystical intensity of religious faith, had no qualms about her probable assignments. Besides, she looked about as large and indestructible as Michelangelo’s Moses, and possessed a temperament of ebullient good nature.

After serving successfully in several other missions, she was sent to China in the late 1930s. Establishing herself at a mission in Shensi, northeastern China, she was the only Western-trained medical worker among the 2,000,000 residents of this agricultural region. In all likelihood, she was the largest woman ever seen by the Chinese children under her care—over six feet, four inches tall, with a Valkyrie’s frame—but so gentle that none of the children were awed by her presence. Her appearance anywhere was a signal for laughter and games; she never seemed too tired to play with children and teach them little songs.

Invading Japanese armies passed within two miles of her mission and clinic in 1938, but none of the villagers ever betrayed the foreigner’s presence. She had a quick, retentive mind, and learned to speak Mandarin Chinese almost as well as she knew her own language. On the rare occasions when an English-speaking visitor reached the out-of-the-way settlement, he was surprised to find Sister Annie speaking his language quite capably. Throughout the war and into the postwar era, she continued to bring Christianity and expert medical care to her adopted people.

When the Communists seized control of China, however, the Christian missionaries were doomed. The Christian God became a hateful image in a shrine reserved for Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, and a beloved missionary nurse in a farming village was transformed into an enemy of the people. The commissars and their lackeys began by hedging Annie about with arbitrary regulations, then they confiscated medical supplies intended for her patients.

None of these measures succeeded in halting her work. Exasperated at their failure, the local party leaders finally dragged her before a kangaroo-style People’s Court. The word had been passed that any villager who arose to denounce her for crimes against the state would be handsomely rewarded. Not a single accuser appeared. Having lost face before the entire village, the Reds were more determined than ever to punish her.

If no one who knew Sister Annie could be lured into a denunciation of her, the obvious solution was to haul her off to a distant village where no one knew her. Having done this, the Reds threw her into jail as an object-lesson to anyone who befriended Christians. An old woman, knowing nothing of Annie but remembering the humane work of other missionary nurses in the village, begged the Communists to put her in jail with the foreign prisoner so that she could comfort her.

“Even the guards were kind to me,” Annie recalls. “The village people didn’t jeer at me or try to hurt me; they kept trying to pass food to me. They were loyal to the last minute!”

Under the relentless persecution and mistreatment, Annie’s strong body broke down, and in the summer of 1951, she was close to death from pneumonia and malaria. The Reds, who refused to let her leave the country when she was well, hurried to get rid of the ailing woman. Exhausted and gravely ill, she left China and returned to Norway for a long rest and the slow regaining of her normal health.

Eighteen months later she came back to Asia knowing that she would never be readmitted to a Communist China. But there was still work to be done, and she turned her efforts to a squalid shacktown in Hong Kong called Rennie’s Mill Camp.

Three years earlier the routed remnants of Chiang’s army, left behind on the mainland, had thrown together a cluster of shacks beside Junk Bay, a backwater of the British colony without roads, water, light or sanitation. Nearly 8,000 persons, wounded soldiers and their wives and children, camped haphazardly on the steep shores of the bay, ran up the Nationalist flag and claimed the forlorn site as their own.

When Annie reached the camp in March, 1953, traveling by sampan and clambering over the high hills like a lost Viking, she found it haunted by despair; a dirty, disease-ridden place, dragged down by the decline of the Nationalist cause. Another nurse had started a small clinic in a wooden hut, eight by ten feet in floor area, which treated 600 patients a day. Annie and the other nurse shared sleeping quarters in a cubicle attached to the hut.

Sometimes the cases were so numerous and critical that the two nurses put the worst cases in their own cramped beds and spent the night on their feet treating other patients. Their medical equipment consisted of one thermometer, a few antiseptics and dressings, and a rickety table that wobbled groggily on the half-decayed floorboards.

With the approach of Christmas, 1953, the fortunes of the clinic sank to a new low. Both nurses were quite broke, unable to buy the food and medical supplies their patients needed so critically. Acting more from faith than reason, Annie set out to pick her way over the precipitous rocks to Lei Yue Mun pass and cross by sampan to Hong Kong Island, hoping to beg for help.

To her delighted surprise, the mission’s post-office box on the island produced a windfall—$200 in contributions from ten persons overseas. Charging into the shopping crowds, Annie spent every cent on food and medicine. She scarcely noticed the weight of her purchases as she trekked the hard route back to Rennie’s Mill. Until three o’clock Christmas morning, the two nurses were on their feet, handing out life-saving presents and exchanging holiday greetings in Mandarin and Cantonese.

“The money problems weren’t so bad after that,” Annie says. “Gifts came in from welfare organizations and individuals, and we were able to build a little stone clinic and a home for ourselves.”

At the same time, health problems grew worse at Rennie’s Mill. Drug addiction and tuberculosis spread through the camp as its inhabitants abandoned hope of an early return to China.

“Bad housing and poor food started the TB,” she explains. “But it got much worse when people gave up hope, or heard about their relatives being killed by the Communists. Chinese people are devoted to their parents, and to be separated from them, or learn they’ve been killed—it’s heartbreaking.

“That was when we realized we’d have to build a rest home for those patients,” Annie says. “We didn’t have any money; all we had was a mission to do the best we could. One day I boarded a sampan with a group of children and we rowed out into Junk Bay until we came to a little inlet. I saw a hill just above us, jutting right out to the shore. I knew right then we would build our chapel on that hill.”

Annie discusses the incident with the fervor and conviction of one who has received a private revelation.

“I saw the whole rest-center arranged around that chapel almost as if it were already completed, built around love. I had no idea where the money was coming from, not any kind of an architect’s plan, but it didn’t matter. I knew that Christ would find a way.”

A way began to appear when a nurse who had worked with Sister Annie visited the United States in 1954, telling children in Wisconsin schools about their work. The response was electrifying. One small boy stood up beside his desk to announce with utter seriousness, “I want to give my heart to Jesus.” The appeal spread like a prairie fire; by February, 1955, Wisconsin school children had sent more than $2,500 for the new rest home, which was called Haven of Hope Sanatorium. An anonymous contributor donated another $5,000 through the Church World Service, Hong Kong welfare agency of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America.

“Now our sanatorium had walls and a roof,” Annie says. “So we prayed for furniture and food for our patients—and for bedpans, too.

“It was a hand-to-mouth existence,” she remembers without a trace of self-pity. “Our staff had no resources—we were so short of staff that some of us worked for two years without a day off. We didn’t mind it at all; we worked with one mind and one spirit, as if that sanatorium and what it stood for was our one reason for living.”

In its early stages, the sanatorium was nothing more than a rest home. One day, almost as an afterthought on a busy round of duties, Annie asked a few of her patients to help her with some routine tasks. They pitched in at once and returned the following day to volunteer for more duties. They kept at the work for several days, then called on Annie in a kind of delegation.

“Give us instructions, show us what to do,” they respectfully demanded. “We want to learn how to be real nurses.”

Annie agreed, taking care to see that none of the volunteers exerted themselves beyond the limits of their precarious health. After three months, they insisted on examinations to show what they had learned.

From modest and tentative beginnings, the courses multiplied and expanded into a full-scale nursing school, offering a two-and-a-half-year progression of classes in eleven different subjects, with stiff exams. Most of the pupils are girls between eighteen and twenty who specialize in TB nursing. The eleventh class was graduated in February, 1962, and the demand for new enrollments was so brisk that Annie, as Director of Nursing Services, could accept only five out of sixty eager applicants.

The sanatorium grew into a 206-bed institution of modern and spotless appearance, and a 40-bed rehabilitation center for chronic and infectious TB patients has been built nearby. Church World Service cut a road through to the isolated site and it was later paved by the colony government. Tuberculosis has been brought under control at Rennie’s Mill Camp, and the Haven of Hope is drawing many of its patients from outside. There is no danger of a shortage; TB strikes everywhere among Hong Kong’s poor.

Haven of Hope is administered by the Junk Bay Medical Council, which also operates a clinic at Rennie’s Mill. Four doctors comprise the sanatorium staff. Except for Annie and Miss Martha Boss, the assistant matron, from Cleveland, Ohio, all the nurses are Chinese. Miss Boss, trained in the same diligent tradition as Annie, spends three days a week at the sanatorium, three days on church work and school duties in Rennie’s Mill, and the seventh day on an industrial medical project.

Rennie’s Mill Camp no longer looks like a shacktown. Catholic and Protestant mission schools have been established, and many residents are employed in handicraft shops. A new police post has been erected beside the camp, and a bus line carries camp residents to the business and shopping districts of Kowloon. Soon a reservoir is to be constructed with government aid on a hill above the camp, and a modern housing development will replace inadequate dwellings.

Taiwanese flags still fly in the breeze at many places in the camp, and Nationalist Chinese contribute to its support. But its main lease on life comes from the churches and the colony of Hong Kong.

Although the scope of Annie’s activities has become much wider, she has lost none of her personal and religious attitude. When she walks through the wards she is followed by the smiles of hundreds of children. At any moment, she will stop to lead a grinning group of little girls, perched on their beds like sparrows, in a song. With Annie joining in the gestures, the kids sing out in Cantonese “Jesus loves little children ... like me ... (pointing to themselves) ... like you ... (pointing at Annie or the girl in the nearest bed) ... like all the others” (with a big, wide-open sweep of the arms).

Annie hugs a lively, black-haired youngster and says quietly, “Her mother was seven months pregnant when she swam from China to Macao with this little one on her back. The girl’s been here two years, and she’s gradually getting better. Her mother went back to China, and has probably been liquidated by the Communists.”

Another girl reacts to Annie’s pat on the head with the wiggly cordiality of a puppy.

“This little one was scared to death of ‘imperialists’ when she came here,” Annie explains. “It took us a long time to persuade her that the Red propaganda wasn’t true.”

Her first two patients at Haven of Hope, a brother and sister, have now completely recovered. Both had seen their parents tortured and killed by the Reds.

“When the girl came to us, her face was like stone,” Annie says. “For two years I played with her, trying all kinds of funny things to bring her out of that frozen stupor, but she never smiled once.

“I wasn’t getting anywhere,” she continues. “Then I tried something different. On July 6, 1955, I put her in a sampan with eleven other kids, and took them all to see the wonderful new building we’d just finished. You know, the first time she got a look at it she broke into a big smile! It was the first time she looked happy. Now she’s fourteen, and her greatest ambition is to be a nurse.”

A magnificent chapel, built exactly where Annie had visualized it, was completed in time for Christmas services in 1961. A group of Norwegian seamen donated an illuminated cross to surmount its roof. At night, when their ships sail out from Hong Kong, they can see it glowing above a line of hills that cut back from the sea like the fiords of Norway.

To Annie, the chapel embodies the same spirit she expressed in naming the eleven wards at Haven of Hope Sanatorium: Love, Peace, Joy, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Neatness, Temperance, Hope and Courage.

For qualities like these, exemplified in her work at Rennie’s Mill Camp and the sanatorium, Sister Annie Margareth Skau was given the Florence Nightingale Award of the International Red Cross on May 18, 1961. Annie regarded the award not as a personal tribute, but as an honor earned and shared by everyone who worked or contributed to make the Haven of Hope a reality.

“There is so much that needs to be done for these poor, homeless people,” she says. “Why, we’ve hardly begun the job.”

In 1951, the same year that Annie Skau was exiled from Red China, the Communists drove out a remarkable European-Chinese couple who had been helping moneyless families to support themselves by setting up home industries. Their house, with all their savings invested in it, was seized by the state and they reached Hong Kong with a total capital of thirty-four cents.

The husband, Gus Borgeest, had been a production expediter in a Shanghai textile mill for twenty years. His background was almost as international as the U.N.; a British subject, he was born in Shanghai of mixed British, Danish, Portuguese, Italian and German ancestry. Mona, his Christian-Chinese wife, was born of Cantonese parents in the Hong Kong fishing town of Aberdeen.

During the Japanese invasion, Gus was interned for two years. He spent his time in prison reading about the Quakers and became converted to their ideal of helping others. When the war ended, he returned to his Shanghai job until Mona contracted tuberculosis. To aid her recovery, the couple moved to the more favorable climate of Hangchow. It was only a stopover, for the political climate that developed after the Reds took control made the survival of Christian welfare workers an impossibility.

Arriving in Hong Kong, Gus found a job in the Fish and Vegetable Marketing Organization of the colony government. Mona had regained her health, and the two of them spent their spare hours doing refugee welfare work in the squatter settlements. It was thoroughly discouraging; living conditions were deplorable and the refugees, subsisting on handouts, were losing their pride and initiative.

“We aren’t accomplishing anything,” Gus told Mona. “It’s a waste of time—unless we can do something, find some way to help people earn their way out of these miserable firetraps.”

After a long series of discussions in which they considered and discarded a variety of self-help schemes, Gus and Mona agreed to stake all their resources on one hopeful but wholly untried plan. They put aside every spare penny until they had saved $700. Now Gus was ready to present their plan to the appropriate officials of the colony government.

He went to K. M. A. Barnett, District Commissioner and the colony’s top authority on the Chinese people and their customs. Mr. Barnett listened in some wonderment while Gus outlined a proposal to build a refugee rehabilitation center on a desolate island seven miles west of Hong Kong Island. He would teach people how to make a living by farming marginal land—and there was plenty of such land lying idle in the colony.

The Commissioner was friendly, but he needed the answers to certain questions. What was Gus’s farming experience? Twenty years in a textile plant. Why did Gus think he could grow anything on that island? Hadn’t the Chinese farmers abandoned it?—and they could grow almost anything, anywhere! Gus was positive he could make it go. Did he have any money? Gus mentioned the $700 and said he was sure it would be enough for a starter. On the face of it, the plan looked highly unfeasible to Mr. Barnett, but he sensed something out of the ordinary in Gus’s determination. Besides, the Commissioner reflected, his office was never crowded with people who intended to do something simply for the benefit of their fellow men.

Having weighed the matter thoroughly, District Commissioner Barnett recommended that the strange couple from Shanghai be given a chance. The colony government leased the barren, 200-acre island to Gus for thirty-four dollars a year, and he and Mona spent most of their savings to buy two tents, bedding, a sack of rice, cooking utensils and farming tools.

On June 5, 1953, Gus, Mona, their five-year-old daughter, Naomi, and two refugee farmers set sail for their new home, which Gus had rechristened Sunshine Island, in a hired junk. On their first night ashore it rained four inches in two hours, but they stuck it out with Mona doing the cooking and Naomi scampering around for field grass to ignite the fire. Twelve days after they landed, a refugee fisherman, his wife and daughter nosed their leaky boat against a sandy beach and became the next settlers.

Within a month, Gus and his helpers had tilled a small patch of land and were raising some chickens, geese and nanny goats. Three-fourths of his capital had been consumed by these improvements and the farming books he pored over every night. An interest-free loan from a Quaker friend kept the venture afloat, and they sweated through the humid summer building grass huts, planting crops, and slashing paths through the shoulder-high sword grass.

Any heavenly blessings they received did not cover weather conditions, for Typhoon Tess flattened their huts and tore up their garden. Yet the improbable colony earned its first income at the end of five months—$2.60 from the sale of rabbits they had raised. Loans and small gifts from friends overseas furnished additional support. Virtually nothing went swimmingly; the first few families who joined them on Sunshine couldn’t stomach the solitary island and had no interest in working to pay their way.

One of the worst catastrophes in Hong Kong history—the Shek Kip Mei fire that destroyed the shacks of more than 60,000 squatters—created an unsought opportunity for Gus. Strapped for cash, he landed a temporary job helping to relocate the fire victims and sent his earnings back to Mona, who kept the Sunshine Island project breathing. He returned in a few months to find the island earning about one-third of what the Borgeests had spent on it.

Both of them decided on some major changes. He talked to welfare agencies and secured their help in selecting people who had the desire and the qualifications to benefit from the scheme; farmers and those who wanted to learn simple trades, or people like Professor Ting, a former lecturer at Hangchow Christian College, who was willing to mind the geese while building up his shattered health. Every worker on the island earned $.35 a day, plus food and lodging for his family; a puny income, even by Hong Kong standards, but in their view, infinitely preferable to handouts.

Welfare organizations in Hong Kong had been watching the progress of the fledgling colony and were quick to appreciate its value. The United Church of Canada donated $960, the Hong Kong Welfare Society put up $30 a month to pay families working on the island, and other agencies joined in—Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services and the Lutheran World Federation—sending cash, supplies and carefully chosen settlers.

When the first stone houses on the island were completed in 1955, Gus struck a note of triumph by giving them the high-sounding name of Villa Borghese—a salute to his Italian ancestors. Twenty families, comprising 100 persons, had entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the plan, digging terraced gardens from the rocky hillsides and planting pineapples. Bamboo, banana, and pine trees were set firmly on the hillsides or in the sheltered hollow between Sunshine’s two highest hills. Refugee students, earning their tuition from welfare agencies, excavated a fish-breeding pond.

For the first time Gus was able to pay himself a salary of $36 a month, but as often as not in succeeding months he turned it right back into the kitty to balance his accounts. Periodic crises like typhoons, crop failures, and the death of valuable livestock regularly badgered the colony, but Gus contrived to ride them out.

In 1957, Gus was laid low by a serious case of tuberculosis. For six months he reluctantly remained in a chair placed on a sunny terrace in front of his house. From there he directed Mona in the management of the colony. Gradually regaining his strength, he recovered fully in two years and resumed active charge of the enterprise.

Increased aid from the outside enabled Gus to raise every worker’s daily pay to 70 cents. Sunshine Island lost its bleak look; besides its new stone buildings, it had over 800 fruit trees and 300 pigs, including 30 breeding sows. Roads had been chopped through its spiny ridges, knitting the whole project together.

Hong Kong’s government staff, satisfied that Gus was doing something solidly beneficial for refugees, furnished district officers, agriculturists, forestry and fisheries experts as consultants on various Sunshine Island jobs.

But the human dividends of Sunshine Island were far more impressive than its physical achievements. More than 700 men and women, including a number of drug addicts, had found new hope on the island. After working there for six months or a year and creating a small nest-egg from their savings, they applied their newly acquired skills to start their own farms on marginal land or get jobs in the city. A large majority of them are now earning their own living in the British colony.

Gus, having conceived Sunshine Island as a pilot project for farming marginal land, schooled a group of his “graduates” in a marginal-farm resettlement at Cheung Sheung, in the New Territories. Each new farmer received two acres from the Hong Kong government, plus a cow, farm tools and a small cash allowance. Practically all of them made the grade as independent farmers.

Activities expanded once more on Sunshine Island when the Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce donated $2,500 to build a piggery for 30 animals, and 20 more sties were added to it in 1961. Papaya and pomegranate trees were added to the orchard. The island became a local attraction for visitors, with Boy Scouts and other youth organizations camping and swimming at a beach on the side of the island most distant from the farm area.

With the knowledge he paid a steep price for on Sunshine Island, Gus has set up marginal-farm projects at three more locations besides Cheung Sheung.

“I think that Mona and I have reached our first major objective,” he said, early in 1962. “That is to show refugee families a better way of living than handouts and squatter settlements, and to help strengthen the over-strained economy of Hong Kong.”

Several other organizations have adopted the self-help system pioneered by the Borgeests, and Gus is ready to move on to fresh challenges once the Sunshine Island settlement becomes self-supporting. He believes this can be done within three years; from there on, he would like to turn Sunshine over to an administrative committee capable of running it without him.

The island has become a bustling work center. A one-handed stonemason who has built hundreds of feet of stone-and-cement walls for pig pastures is erecting the walls of another piggery. Dozens of Hakka women in their black-fringed straw hats are transporting dirt in straw baskets to clear the site of a new road. One man tirelessly splits boulders with a heavy hammer and a chisel; while he works, he listens to Cantonese music issuing from his transistor radio, perched on an adjoining rock. A sampan taxi, operating between Sunshine and the nearby island of Peng Chau, supports a family with several children and a seaworthy chow dog.

Gus is absorbed in new plans to help others. Two years ago he undertook a complete survey of the island of Shek Kwu Chau, two miles west of Sunshine, to determine whether it could be made into a rehabilitation center for some of Hong Kong’s 250,000 narcotics addicts. With only slight modifications, the survey has become the blueprint for the center, opening in 1962 under the administration of the Society for the Aid and Rehabilitation of Drug Addicts. He was one of the early developers of Hei Ling Chau, the island leprosarium run by the Mission to Lepers, and remains a member of its administrative council.

On the last day of August, 1961, Gus and Mona became winners of a Ramon Magsaysay Award, the “Nobel Prize of the East,” for their Sunshine Island accomplishments. The award also carried a $10,000 prize, and the Borgeests decided to save it for the education of their three daughters.

“We have no other funds,” Gus explained. “But a lot of people who heard about the prize must have decided that old Gus is on easy street. Our contributions fell off, and our debts started shooting up again.”

At fifty-two, Gus is a ruggedly built man whose face and bald head have been burned dark brown by the sun. His one gospel is the doctrine of helping others to help themselves.

“The Chinese people don’t want to live on anybody’s charity,” Gus said. “And that’s doubly true of the refugees; they wouldn’t have come here, most of them, if they’d been willing to become stooges for a government that did all the thinking for them.”

Gus has a well-defined conception of the way he prefers to spend his own future:

“I’d like to devote the rest of my life to work among the lepers and drug addicts. We couldn’t do much for the addicts on Sunshine; we’d get them accustomed to living without drugs, but they’d slip back into addiction when they met their old companions back in the city.

“And if there’s time enough, I’d like to go to one of the rural areas in the Philippines with Mona and set up another place like Sunshine Island. With what we’ve learned here, I know we could do a lot better.”

The heroic works of the Borgeests and Sister Annie Skau, outstanding though they are, have directly affected the lives of less than one percent of Hong Kong’s refugees. But the dimensions of the crisis are so great that they have engaged the attention of scores of humane and intelligent people. They have gone far beyond routine assistance to devise creative and practical solutions to the colony’s refugee problems.

Monsignor John Romaniello, a Maryknoll missionary from New Rochelle, N.Y., used his noodle to produce millions of meals for hungry refugees. A roundish man with nothing on his mind but the Lord’s work and noodles, he revels in his title as “noodle king of Hong Kong.” He sings about noodles, writes about noodles, puns about noodles and buttonholes every American tourist he meets for contributions to buy more noodles.

It is showmanship with a purpose. Behind the kidding lies an idea so obvious that no one ever thought of it until Monsignor Romaniello came to Hong Kong in 1957 as director of Catholic Relief Services. He noticed that millions of dollars’ worth of American surplus foods like milk powder, corn meal, and wheat flour being sent to the colony to feed refugees were winding up on the black market. Having lived among the Chinese for thirty years, he decided to keep a close eye on the surplus-food traffic.

One day he observed a young girl taking a sack of surplus flour into a bakery, then paying the baker to convert it into noodles. The simple incident stayed in his mind, nagging at him. Later, while riding across the harbor on the Star Ferry, the answer to a gigantic riddle came to him in one reflective flash; the little girl was paying to have the flour made into noodles because her mother, like most refugee mothers, had no way of turning the flour into an edible meal. The same was true of com meal; there was neither space nor cooking facilities for it in the average refugee cubicle. In their raw state, the surplus foods were alien to a Chinese palate.

Why not convert these foods into noodles? No colony baker was equipped to handle the job on the scale Monsignor Romaniello envisioned. On any scale, the cost was too high for the refugee feeding program. Monsignor Romaniello, helped by other Maryknoll fathers, constructed a noodle-making machine out of scrap parts and an old engine. It looked like nothing ever designed by engineers, but it rolled out the noodles.

The Maryknoll noodles caught on at once with the Chinese, who found them easy to prepare and agreeable to eat. With funds provided by Catholic Relief Services and the Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce, the first noodle-making contraption was replaced by a production-line model. Within four years, Hong Kong noodles were pouring out of the machines at the rate of 5,000,000 pounds a year, and welfare organizations like the Church World Service had adopted them. Noodle machines were exported to the Philippines, Macao, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam as the noodle mania grew.

Another Catholic priest, working in a phase of welfare work wholly unlike that of the “noodle king,” has achieved a degree of success comparable to that of Monsignor Romaniello. He is Father P. J. Howatson, an Irish Jesuit who has become a key figure in the colony’s youth leadership program.

Welfare workers will tell you, holding their breath as they do so, that gangs of young hoodlums have not yet infested Hong Kong. Widespread poverty, overcrowded housing, and a predominantly young population seem to offer fertile soil for their growth, but welfare people believe juvenile gangs have not appeared primarily because of the integral unity of the Chinese family, with its respect for parents and elders.

There is a second line of defense, the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association, which embraces 13,000 of the poorest youngsters in its recreational and leadership programs. Father Howatson is the prime mover in the Association, doing some of its finest work among rooftop squatters in Wanchai, a waterfront jungle of bars and cabarets where shiploads of pent-up sailors are regularly turned loose.

Because of the magnitude of Hong Kong’s welfare needs and the bewildering assortment of private organizations attempting to deal with them, there is an absolute necessity for a central clearinghouse to eliminate overlapping in some areas and neglect in others. This is the function of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, a coordinating agency of ninety welfare organizations which regularly checks the balance sheets of its affiliates. If they pass muster, the colony government grants them substantial aid to supplement their own resources.

The Council, under its executive secretary Madge Newcombe, is also charged with discovering where and what the needs of poor people are, and then of assigning the religious or welfare societies best equipped to satisfy them. There is no shortage of needs; the Council’s concern is to avoid imbalance and wasted effort in meeting them.

Five years ago the Council created the Central Relief Records Office. With its file of approximately 200,000 cards, listing the name of every relief client and the aid he is receiving from each agency, the office has drastically reduced the duplication of welfare-agency work and chiseling by potential recipients. There is no need for begging; relief is so well organized that any hungry person can get a meal at a welfare agency.

Apart from feeding and housing the colony’s displaced persons, there is a human problem of especial poignance. A resettlement estate, at its outset, is an assembly of strangers from all over China, some from big cities, some from back-country hamlets, tossed together like beans in a bowl.

At Wong Tai Sin, one of the largest resettlement estates, 60,000 people are packed into long rows of multi-story concrete blocks. Physically, they are far better off than they were in the shacktowns they came from, but when they first moved in they were strangers lost in a crowd, rootless and with no sense of community interests.

During World Refugee Year (1959-60), the United States government met the problem of building community consciousness at Wong Tai Sin with one of its most effective gifts—$210,000 to build a community center there. Now completed and in full operation, it is a large, modern, five-story building teeming with community enterprises.

The variety of its activities is bewildering: classes for the deaf, courses in Diesel mechanics and refrigeration engineering, Chinese opera, day nurseries, social events, libraries, movies and a hundred other interests—all of them designed to form a congenial community out of thousands of isolated families.

The idea worked so well that the United Kingdom put up an equal amount of money to build a second center in the new-born industrial city of Tsuen Wan. The Toronto and Canadian World Refugee Year committees donated $75,000 for a third community center at Chai Wan, on Hong Kong Island. Others are planned, and the public response to the centers has been so enthusiastic that the colony hopes to establish one in every resettlement estate.

The Hong Kong branch of Church World Service, a department of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in America, picked up fresh vigor a few years ago. Dr. Elbert E. Gates, Jr., pastor of the First Baptist Church of Westfield, N.J., made an incidental stop at Hong Kong during a trip to Australia. He and his wife, June, had a close-up look at the colony’s refugees, and what they saw made an unforgettable impression on them. In 1959, he gave up his pastorate and took a one-third cut in salary to become director of the Church World Service branch in Hong Kong.

Working together, the couple have become leaders in colony refugee activities. The statistical side alone is enormous—distributing 53,000 quarts of powdered milk a day and 2,500,000 balanced-ration biscuits a month, and operating a noodle factory and a central kitchen with a daily capacity of 40,000 meals. There are scholarships for young people, dental clinics, foundling homes, homes for orphaned girls and a dozen other undertakings.

Dr. Gates, a cheerful, tireless advocate of the colony’s poor people, interrupts his work many times to show overseas visitors what is being done, and still needs to be done, to help the refugees. He takes most pleasure, perhaps, in displaying the “self-help” projects of Church World Service.

At one school in the hills of Kowloon, he directs a home where girls are taught to make dresses, sweaters and ties for the American market. All were formerly homeless, most are under twenty years old, some are blind, others have only one hand or one arm. They have all learned to knit, including the girl with one arm, and are earning their living by making high-quality products for sale in the best stores.

“We don’t want to produce curios, or something that tries to play on people’s sympathy by calling itself a refugee product,” Dr. Gates says. “These girls have proved they can turn out goods that will hold their own in a competitive market.”

It is obvious that Doctor and Mrs. Gates are enjoying themselves as much as those they help when they drop into the Faith Hope Nursery, a joint enterprise of Church World Service and the YWCA. The nursery children, two to five years old, are shack-dwellers whose mothers work during the day. At the nursery, the kids receive daytime care, meals, clothes and a daily bath, with plenty of time left over for group singing and dancing. When the pastor and his wife appear, moppet grins spread the width of the classroom and there is a spirited exchange of Cantonese greetings.

Church World Service, together with CARE, Catholic Relief Services and the Lutheran World Service, form the recognized “big four” of Hong Kong’s private welfare organizations. Each one does its own work and cooperates willingly with the other three, as well as scores of other Catholic, Protestant and non-denominational groups. One hears a certain amount of subdued muttering about this or that religious group pushing hard for new members, but there is no sign that it has seriously impaired their aim, which is to help all poor people without regard to finicky distinctions of race or religion.

CARE, the non-denominational American member of the big four, made a brilliant and original addition to its long-established welfare program in 1961. This was the Ap Chau Island settlement, built for the families of fishermen.

The people who fish the waters around Ap Chau, a three-acre island in the northeastern corner of the New Territories, had for generations spent their entire lives on fishing junks, never establishing homes on shore or attending schools. But the technical demands of the modern fishing industry put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they petitioned the colony government for permission to build homes on Ap Chau and send their children to school.

Graham French, a Philadelphia philanthropist who was in Hong Kong to observe CARE operations, heard about the petition and became curious enough to investigate it thoroughly. He discovered that the petitioners were so deeply indebted to loan-sharks that they had no real chance to finance housing ashore unless they got outside funds. He offered to give $17,500 to get the settlement started, CARE added another $20,000 and the colony government spent $14,000 to clear a site for the houses.

With these combined funds, a settlement consisting of houses for forty-eight families, or 360 people, was completed in December, 1961. The Royal Engineers laid an undersea 1,000-yard pipeline from a mainland reservoir to supply the island with fresh water. The fishing families, for their part, formed a community cooperative to administer the scheme. Rents go into a revolving fund, and members of the co-op can borrow from it at one percent interest to repair and mechanize their boats.

The fishermen’s wives were at first so naÏve about living on shore that they tried to furnish their houses with a piled-up heap of boards and braces resembling the poop deck of a fishing junk.

After a time, the seagoing ladies learned to adjust themselves to conventional tables and chairs. Using sewing machines supplied by CARE, they took instructions from the government teacher on the island and learned to sew their own curtains. Their husbands took carpentry instruction at the same school and produced some acceptable furniture. Ultimately, the entire project will become self-supporting.

A similar cooperative settlement has been launched at Sai Kung, a market town in the New Territories. Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie, Hong Kong industrialists and philanthropists, donated pigs to bolster the domestic economy of Sai Kung. Three other allied ventures have been okayed by the government for construction at Tai Tam, on Hong Kong Island, and on the outlying islands of Tsing Yi and Po Toi.

Numerically, the most extensive of all private welfare groups in Hong Kong are the Kaifongs, or Chinese neighborhood welfare associations, with 665,000 members. Operating on slim budgets, they have nevertheless managed to provide medical care, distribute emergency relief supplies, conduct hundreds of free classes, set up noodle factories and give anti-cholera shots.

The Kaifongs are a departure from the older Chinese practice of limiting charity to your own family or clan; they branch into such community-wide interests as traffic safety and antinoise campaigns. Once they even put on a drive to persuade Kowloon kids not to fly their kites in the path of airliners approaching Kai Tak Airport! (This last one sounds a bit overzealous, but not to anyone who has stood in the streets of Kowloon Tong while the jets roared overhead, all but untying his shoelaces with their vibrations.)

Although the United States government has conducted no regular foreign-aid program in Hong Kong, it has given the colony almost $30,000,000 worth of aid, either as surplus foods or as part of its Far East Refugee Program.

The main burden of relief falls, as it should, on the colony government. The Hong Kong administration spends $10,000,000 annually on social welfare work and more than $55,000,000 a year on every form of direct and indirect aid to its millions of poor residents.

The problem of what to do about its refugees had been with the colony throughout its history. Whenever China was afflicted by famine, unrest or revolution, thousands of its people sought temporary haven in Hong Kong.

Perhaps the most noted refugee of the pre-British era was Ti Ping, the last boy Emperor of the Sung Dynasty, who was driven out of China by the Mongols in 1279 A.D. He encamped on the Kowloon Peninsula for almost a year, then resumed his flight to the west, where he was defeated and drowned in a sea battle with the Mongols. An inscribed rectangular rock called the Sung Wong T’oi, or Terrace of the Sung Emperor, stands near Kai Tak Airport to commemorate his stopover.

The British had barely settled in their new colony when a group of refugees who had been plotting to overthrow the Manchu emperors fled there in the 1840s. Unwilling to endanger their relations with the Manchus, the British branded the plotters under the arm and shipped them back to China. The Tai Ping Rebellion of 1850, fomented by a Christian Chinese, Hung Siu Tsuen, to depose the Manchus, provoked serious disorder in Canton and brought another wave of frightened Chinese to Hong Kong.

Thousands of Chinese streamed into the colony during the next decade, but most of them moved on to the goldfields of California and Australia, or to contract labor in the Americas and the islands of the Indian Ocean. Their passage was expedited by labor-traders who often recruited manpower by kidnaping Orientals and shipping them out in barbarously overcrowded vessels.

The Boxer Rebellion of 1900, bringing a rash of murders of missionaries and Chinese Christians, forced thousands to seek safety in Hong Kong. A far greater number arrived in 1911 when Dr. Sun Yat Sen overthrew the Manchu Empire. In the early chaotic days of the Chinese Republic about 100,000 refugees came to the crown colony, jamming its housing and creating prime conditions for a plague outbreak which presently killed nearly 2,000 persons.

There was a brief reversal in the direction of the refugee procession when Britain entered World War I and 60,000 Chinese turned back home. But continuing disorders in China brought many right back to Hong Kong, and the southward drift persisted through the 1920s.

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the drift became a tidal wave; in two years 600,000 refugees crossed the border. The population had reached 1,600,000 when the Japanese attacked Hong Kong in December, 1941.

Having no desire to support such a large population, the Japanese conquerors set to work to reduce the head-count. Their methods were a model of brutality; starvation, execution and driving the Chinese back to their homeland with bayonets. All who attempted to detach themselves from the northbound herd were instantly killed. By the end of the war, the Japanese had cut the colony population to less than 600,000.

During the war, the colony came perilously close to losing its chances of ever being returned to its place in the British Empire. At the Yalta Conference, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Stalin privately that he thought Hong Kong should be returned to China or made into an internationalized free port after the Japanese were defeated.

Nothing was said to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had flatly opposed every attempt to whittle down Britain’s colonial possessions. Ten years after, when asked about the Roosevelt proposal, Churchill replied, “According to the American record [of the Yalta Conference], President Roosevelt said he knew I would have strong objections to this suggestion. That was certainly correct—and even an understatement.”

Chiang Kai-shek also campaigned for the return of Hong Kong to China and almost as soon as the war ended, James F. Byrnes, American Secretary of State, announced that the future status of Hong Kong would be determined at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. As soon as they learned about this, the British, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, registered their emphatic disapproval and the idea died without further discussion.

Although Hong Kong did not go back to China, the Chinese went back to Hong Kong. During the postwar struggles of Nationalist and Communist forces, thousands of their Chinese countrymen removed to Hong Kong, including virtually all who had been driven from the colony by the Japanese. But the great human avalanche came in 1949, when the Reds gained absolute control of the country. Fugitives from Communist “liberation” swarmed into Hong Kong at the rate of 10,000 a week.

One year after the Communists took over, the colony’s population reached 2,360,000. More than 330,000 people were living in hillside squatter settlements, sleeping on the sidewalks, on tenement rooftops, even in the center strip of the widest Kowloon streets. A shacktown fire in 1950 drove 20,000 persons from their homes. The next year a single fire dishoused 10,000 people, and a series of fires in 1952 burned out 15,000 others.

Sooner or later, colony officials told themselves, the refugees would return to China as the immigrant waves of other years had done. The government took a firm stand on the doctrine that it was not supposed to become the landlord for millions of its residents, but it yielded sufficiently to erect temporary wooden huts and bungalows for 40,000 squatters.

All the high-principled resolutions to stay out of the public housing business were swept away on Christmas Night, 1953. A roaring conflagration broke out at Shek Kip Mei, in Upper Kowloon, racing up the tiers of hillside shacks as if it were mounting a flight of steps. Somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 people were left homeless. About half of them found shelter with friends or relatives, and the government was plunged into the enormous task of feeding, clothing and rehousing the fire victims.

Pausing just long enough to permit the displaced people to sift their few remaining possessions from the ashes, the government bulldozed the 45-acre site, leveled the ground, and had erected emergency accommodations on it in fifty-three days. The streets had hardly been cleared of homeless people when a new shack fire at Tai Hang Tung dishoused 24,000 others.

Simultaneously, the colony recognized the inadequacy of its cottage-and-bungalow housing, which required too much land and provided for too few people. It began the construction of multi-story resettlement estates—six- and seven-story blocks of reinforced concrete clustered together in populous communities. Eleven such estates, lodging 360,000 people in fireproof and typhoon-proof structures, have been completed since 1954 at a cost of $32,000,000. One toilet is shared by hundreds of people and there is no electric light in the rooms unless the tenant pays extra for it. But when they are seen beside the remaining shacks, the multi-story blocks seem immeasurably superior. In addition to the multi-story estates, 80,000 persons have been housed in fourteen cottage resettlement areas.

An apartment in a resettlement block is a concrete-walled room, renting for $1.60 to $4.60 a month. The Hong Kong Housing Authority has built a higher-quality low-cost apartment in skyscraper developments, renting from $8 to $23 a month, and 106,000 persons are to be accommodated in them by 1964.

Around 30,000 people live in flats built by the Hong Kong Housing Society, a voluntary group aided by government loan funds, and this number will be doubled in a few years. If the colony maintains its present rate of building, it can provide new apartments for 100,000 persons annually for the next five years.

This small mountain of statistics looms large on the landscape until you consider that there are now about 500,000 to 600,000 people living in squatter shacks, on sidewalks and rooftops and in tumbledown firetrap tenements. Theoretically, they could all be rehoused in five or six years, but the colony’s population is rising meanwhile at the rate of 150,000 a year.

The dreams of Hong Kong housing officials are haunted by figures; a baby born every five minutes and illegal immigrants sneaking across the border at an incalculable rate. Illegal immigration is never estimated at less than 10,000 a year and often set as high as 40,000. Popular guesswork may jack it up to 20,000 a month.

In its own protection, the colony has been forced to forbid further immigration, except at an approximate rate of fifty a day. Its only shield against a smothering horde of advancing people is the effectiveness of its land and marine police. To the extent that the border police can restrain illegal immigration, the colony may be able to catch up with its housing needs, provided, of course, that the birth rate tapers off.

The colony’s marine police are a small, well-trained force contending with overwhelming odds. Their fleet of 27 boats and 610 men is charged with patrolling 400 miles of coastline and 728 square miles of territorial waters. They have one 58-foot boat with a top speed of 22 knots and three jet boats of 20-foot length, useful in hot pursuit, with a maximum speed of 42 knots. Their 70-foot launches mount a 50-caliber Browning machine-gun on the foredeck and carry a cache of smaller arms, but they deliver no more than 11 knots.

As many as five of the patrol boats may be out on duty at one time, but the sea lanes from Macao and China are crowded with ships at all hours. A police launch cruising along the western edge of Hong Kong waters on a clear day will often have forty vessels within its sight.

There are red sails in every sunset off Lantau, largest and westernmost of Hong Kong’s 237 islands. The skipper of a police launch may spend every spare moment scanning the horizon for suspicious-looking craft, but even in full daylight he cannot hope to detect and halt all the smugglers. At night, when the smugglers slip through fog or run without lights, the skipper’s chances are considerably slimmer. The Red Chinese gunboats are also on the prowl just beyond territorial limits, hoping to catch their runaway countrymen, but they are often unsuccessful.

The Hong Kong courts charged 1,551 illegal immigrants in 1961; another 1,763 were intercepted by the marine police and sent back to China. Thousands of others slipped through the net either at Macao or Hong Kong. Here are a few typical incidents that occurred during two months in the winter of 1961-62.

Eighty-three men, women, and children stole a Chinese military launch and escaped to Macao. Marine police caught seventy-three illegal immigrants in a motor junk off Lamma Island. Police discovered thirty-two men and women attempting to slip past Castle Peak in a sailing junk. A woman and two children were arrested in Tai Tam Bay, Hong Kong Island. A Communist gunboat intercepted a sampan near Lappa Island, opposite Macao, firing shots into the hull and driving the dozen women and children aboard back to Red territory. A Red gunboat fired on a junk at the mouth of the Canton River estuary, sinking it with all twenty-nine immigrants aboard.

During the same period, an unknown number of illegal immigrants swam across Starling Inlet from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong, using rafts and basketballs to keep themselves afloat. A middle-aged man swam from Lappa Island to Macao under the muzzles of Communist guns to visit his son. On every dark night or at any time there is a chance of screening their passage in foggy or overcast weather, the immigrants keep coming in.

Marine police inspectors say there is a well-organized traffic in smuggling illegal immigrants. Smugglers can buy a second-hand junk in Macao and stuff its hold with twenty to forty immigrants. They have a regular scale of prices based on the financial blood-count of each customer; $40 for well-heeled Shanghai Chinese, $30 for a moderately solvent Fukienese, and $13 to $20 for a Cantonese farmer or laborer. If the smugglers fall into the hands of the marine police, they may spend a year in prison, and their passengers will be sent back to an ice-cold reception in Red China. Jail sentences seldom keep smugglers from returning to the trade; the profits justify the risk.

“If we catch a boat with people that look like genuine fishermen, we may warn them to get a Hong Kong operating license and let them go,” a marine police inspector said. “If we spot one that looks like a regular smuggler, we arrest the whole bunch.”

The marine police crews are predominantly Cantonese; first-class seamen and courageous policemen, but at best they can scarcely hope to snare more than a minority of those who are determined to break through the blockade. When the successful ones reach Hong Kong Island or one of the sheltered coves of the New Territories, they are met by friends, relatives or confederates of the smugglers. They vanish into the almost impenetrable masses of Chinese and emerge a few months later to register as residents. In most cases the British have no alternative but to accept them.

Many of the police are themselves refugees from Red China. They perform their antismuggling duties conscientiously, but if refugees get through despite their best efforts and vigilance, they may be something less than heartbroken.

Protection of the land border with Red China is the responsibility of the 200 uniformed men of the Frontier Division, with headquarters at Fanling, four miles south of the border. Measured in a straight line, the border is only thirteen miles long, but 22 miles as it follows a snaky line from Deep Bay in the west to Mirs Bay in the east. On the colony side, it is backed up by a closed zone which varies in depth from a few hundred yards to a mile. No one except police, farmers living in the area, or persons carrying special passes from the Commissioner of Police is allowed to enter or move about in the closed area.

Before the dramatic refugee surge of May, 1962, only nine-tenths of the border was fenced on the British side, and the stoutness of the fence was variable—high and topped with barbed wire at some places, but no more than a plain, low fence at others. The storming of the barrier in 1962 caused the British to build an entirely new one which stretched the full length of the border. Crowned with many strands of barbed wire, it stood 10 feet high and was laid out like a long cage, with 20 feet of enclosed ground between the outer, parallel fences.

Between the marshlands on the west and the hilly country in the east, the Frontier Division police have three main stations and nine police posts. From each of these, police observers scan the border with binoculars. Foot patrols also keep a continuous watch along the boundary. At night, when the closed area is under curfew, searchlights and dogs are added to the regular patrols. When the integrity of the border is as seriously threatened as it was by the spring invasion of 1962, the closed area may be increased to a depth of three miles, as Governor Black ordered on May 19, 1962.

Under normal conditions, farmers who live along the border enjoy a kind of twilight-zone immunity. Known to the patrols, they may cross the border during the day to work either in Hong Kong or China without molestation, but they must be home before nightfall, because the border, with all its rail and road connections, shuts down at dark. Night crossings, even before the 10-foot barrier went up, were discouraged by peremptory challenges and bullets.

The Reds have no fence on their side of the border. They do not need it; nobody wants to get in.

Why did the Red Chinese permit the transborder flight of May, 1962? At first it was interpreted as a deliberate attempt to embarrass the British, and certainly the colony’s police and military units had a thankless assignment. When they transported the captured refugees back to the border, they were jeered at and reviled by colony residents. Protests were issued by international relief officials.

The onus soon shifted to Red China, which was revealed by the exodus as a land of hunger. All news from Communist China is censored or second-hand, so no accurate explanation of the flight could be made at the time. It appeared, however, that industrial retrenchment in the cities of China had caused many city-dwellers to move to rural areas, perhaps to seek food, perhaps to bolster the country’s sagging farm production.

Most of those who crossed the border in the big May surge were from the adjoining province of Kwangtung, indicating that free movement of people within China was confined to this one southern area. Most of those interviewed in Hong Kong complained that they were hungry, and that they had lived on a substandard diet for months with no real hope of improvement.

There was a momentary temptation to regard the flight as a sign that civil government had collapsed in Communist China, but this hope faded on May 25, when the Reds again sealed off the border. No official explanation for the turn-about was made, but newspapermen in the colony suspected that a sharp British protest to Peking may have prompted the clamp-down.

To the refugees in Hong Kong, the world spotlight meant very little, except that it may have made other countries aware that no place in the world has shielded so many fugitives from Communist tyranny as the crown colony.