Trouble on the Double Tenth

The overcrowded Crown Colony of Hong Kong is the scene of a quiet but intense battle for the loyalties of its 2,500,000 Chinese inhabitants. Each year the measure of the battle is in the num ber of flags that fly on Red China's National Day on Oct. 1 and Nationalist China's older "Double Tenth"* anniver sary on Oct. 10. As the Double Tenth dawned last week, the white-starred banner of the Republic of China seemed to have peacefully triumphed over the five-starred Red flag. Then an impetuous official ripped down two Nationalist flags in a strongly anti-Communist refugee project in Kowloon, across the bay from Hong Kong island. Riots, fear, death suddenly erupted across the peninsula.

It was started by enraged refugees, who stormed the government refugee offices where the Nationalist flags were removed. They smashed everything in sight and fired the building. Then, clotting into crowds and then into mobs, they fanned out to other parts of the colony. Club-swinging police dispersed some, but by dusk the rioters had gathered again, in greater strength. Stones and water fell down from rooftops onto the heads of police reinforcements. Their night sticks and tear gas could not still the rioters.

Tomb of Asphalt. Through the night thousands of Chinese ranged the streets, looting and burning shops, factories and schools considered to have pro-Communist affiliations. Then, though it had begun as an anti-Communist eruption, the violence gradually changed complexion. The crowds began singling out foreigners. Europeans were dragged from their cars, beaten mercilessly while their cars were burned. By the morning of the second day, blood lust was running high. Along Kowloon's broad Nathan Road some rioters overturned and fired a taxi bearing Swiss Vice Consul Fritz Ernst and his wife. The escaping driver fell into the arms of the mob, who doused him with gasoline and cremated him on a bed of bubbling asphalt. The Ernsts escaped, but Mrs. Ernst died of burns 48 hours later.

By the afternoon of the second day, as spotter planes wheeled overhead and tear-and vomit-gas bombs popped wildly, Hong Kong's Acting Governor Edgeworth B. David at long last ordered British troops into the troubled areas, soon swept the rioters off the streets. In the debris stretcher-bearers found a shoe containing a human foot. There also were 47 dead, almost all of them rioters destroyed by the terror they had fed. Nearly a hundred stores and buildings had been sacked and burned, and a pall of the smoke of burning loot hovered over Kowloon. Governor David ordered the first curfew in Hong Kong's history. Military forces and police moved in to mop up a fiercely resisting core of rioters, arrested 3,000 Chinese suspected of provoking or leading rioters.

Convenient Theory. When the city was calm again, the government announced its finding: the riots had been caused by Chinese secret societies that victimize the refugees. This was a convenient theory, designed to offend neither the Communists nor the Nationalists, and no one gave it much credence. The riots were undoubtedly spontaneous, but the well-discipline'd movements and the antiforeigner manifestations that marked their later stages smacked suspiciously of classic Communist tactics. As the only political organization in Hong Kong capable of such efficient exploitation, the Communists stood to gain by using the violence to 1) test Hong Kong's strength for a possible Communist takeover, 2) to discredit the Nationalists internationally. A pointed warning came from Communist China, just across the border. "China," said Red Premier Chou Enlai, "can neither ignore nor permit such events." Said an official broadcast: "We will watch carefully whether the British are capable of maintaining peace and order in Hong Kong and Kowloon."

*Marking the founding of the Chinese Republic by Dr. Sun Yat-sen on Oct. 10, 1911.

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