The Buddha Cure

In Hong Kong last week, a local movie star endorsed a popular patent medicine with the ultimate tribute: "It cures you like Buddha." Hong Kong itself, for more than 100 years the warehouse of the Far East, was also taking a cure. Amid cries of street hawkers and the deafening uproar from a string of 100,000 firecrackers to drive off evil spirits. Hong Kong's Governor Sir Alexander Grantham stepped up to a huge, towered gate decorated with neon lights, elaborate flowers and the Union Jack. Snipping a ribbon, he opened a powerful testimonial to the cure's success: the colony's eleventh annual exhibition of local manufactures. Hong Kong expected trade delegations from all over the world to attend.

Back-Alley Boom. The profusion of low-priced local goods displayed in the multicolored stalls was the most hopeful answer yet to Hong Kong's evil spirit--Red China, which is only a few miles away. The United Nations' embargo on trade with China has piled up goods in Hong Kong traders' godowns for want of customers. Exports since 1951 have fallen from 4.4 billion Hong Kong dollars (5.85 to the U.S. dollar) to 2.7 billion, well under the colony's 3.9 billion in imports, chiefly food. Thus the biggest hope for Hong Kong's survival has been to develop its own exports.

Chinese businessmen, who have streamed into Hong Kong by the thousands, bringing only their skills, have developed exports in amazing fashion. Three years ago, less than 15% of Hong Kong's exports were locally made; today more than 25% are. Moreover, local industry is mushrooming so fast that government economists expect that it will rise to 50% within a few years, and that Hong Kong will compete with Japan as the industrial center of the Far East.

Already there are 2,208 factories employing more than 20 men each, and another 100,000 workers are estimated to be employed in thousands of tiny factories in incredibly cramped lofts and lean-tos in back alleys. Since 1948 alone, 13 cotton-spinning mills with 209,000 spindles have been established, and 43,000 more spindles will be added this winter. Other factories, which pay workers as little as 50-c- a day, make everything from floridly painted aluminum spittoons for African natives to ivory chessmen and bamboo furniture for American tourists. More than 400 companies with 80 million Hong Kong dollars capital are still waiting for sites within the small (391 sq. mi.) colony, and the government is working on a plan to create a new industrial zone to meet the demand.

Sudden Riches. Some Hong Kong Chinese manufacturers have piled up quick riches. Typical is the rise of Haking Industries, Ltd., a plastic toothbrush producer launched in 1949 by a group of

Chinese. Started in a single slum tenement room with two machines, today it has a new plant producing 200,000 toothbrushes a day, grosses 6,000,000 Hong Kong dollars annually, and claims to supply 95% of all toothbrushes sold in Indonesia. Its prices (17-c- for a box of eight toothbrushes) astound American and South American buyers.

Without Hong Kong's cheap labor and the ingenuity of its Chinese businessmen, the U.N. embargo on trade with Red China would have led to mass unemployment in the colony, and in turn to strong pro-Communist sentiment. With the new prosperity, of home-grown industry, Communist agitators are conspicuously out of favor with Hong Kong Chinese.

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