Flood of Misery

Like men racing toward the Promised Land, refugees from Red China continued to pour into Hong Kong. By the thousands they burrowed under the new British-built barbed-wire fence on the border, or daringly swam across arms of the South China Sea, buoyed up by inflated bladders.

Once in the crown colony, they dodged through fields and thickets, trying to avoid being spotted by R.A.F. helicopters cruising low over Robins Nest Mountain and the scrub pines of Flower Hill. Most were routed from their hiding places by skirmish lines of British troops, and sent to Fanling camp. There, after a nourishing meal, the luckless refugees were herded onto trains or trucks for the short ride back to Red China. Along the way, fellow Chinese tossed food packages into the refugees' outstretched hands. Most of them saved some of the food against the day when they would try again to get into Hong Kong.

Over the past month, British guards have turned back some 60,000 refugees,* but an estimated 10,000 others slipped through the cordon--in overwhelming, living testimony against the Communist regime that rules their homeland.

Dazzling Food. Once they reach Kowloon or Victoria, they are relatively safe, for the Chinese of Hong Kong are close and clannish and, in a crisis, do not desert their own. The refugees disappear into the life of the Hong Kong poor--grim by Western standards but, measured against Red China, a bit of paradise.

What dazzles the refugees is the abundance of food. Every crowded Hong Kong street is redolent of salt dried fish and the sharp smell of pickles. Vendors offer oranges, bananas and cakes; the stalls of Market Row gleam with eggplant, squash and tomatoes. Workers throng the pork shops to buy succulent halves of crisp, glazed pig. Store fronts are filled with families clustered around rice bowls and side dishes of meat and fish.

In Hong Kong, even if a man sleeps on the street--and 15,000 do each night-- there is work enough to buy at least some food. The unskilled refugees find jobs paying $1 a day as ditchdiggers, coolies, factory sweepers, stevedores. Children perch on street corners putting together plastic flowers for the U.S. market. Young mothers, with babies strapped to their backs, haul water up the mountainside.

A sixth of Hong Kong's 3,250,000 people occupy squatter towns like Diamond Hill, made up of cardboard-walled cubicles and straw-mat lean-tos. More than 80,000 others find homes in tar-paper shacks on tenement rooftops. Some 362,000 refugees have already been housed in the colony's impressive resettlement projects, and construction over the next five years will care for 100,000 more annually. Even the unemployed Chinese refugees in Hong Kong need not starve: there are 86 private and public social service agencies, and the U.S.

Government since 1954 has contributed $28 million worth of surplus food.

Sinking Island. For a while, if the flood of escapees continued, it almost seemed as if overcrowded Hong Kong would burst and sink. The West sensed a powerful duty to relieve Hong Kong and help shelter these patient, dogged refugees from Red misery--and yet there was little enough the West was ready to do. U.S.

immigration is limited to a quota of 105 Chinese a year, but President Kennedy last week authorized the immediate entry of 5,000 Hong Kong Chinese--they will not be new refugees from over the border, but skilled and educated Chinese from an already processed list of 19,000 who have been waiting for years for U.S. visas. On Formosa, President Chiang Kai-shek ordered that all refugees who wanted to come to Formosa be admitted, after political screening.

Hong Kong was somewhat skeptical of Chiang's proposal. Formosa already claims a population density of 770 per sq. mi. (second only to The Netherlands), and its birth rate is greater than its annual increase in food. Besides, the screening process in the past has proved excruciatingly slow, and transportation was not readily available.

No other nation, West or East, has proved willing to enlarge its Chinese quota. Why did the Chinese Reds allow the refugees to get out, thereby offering the world plain proof of the Communist system's failures in China? The reason, in all likelihood, was that the Peking regime did not want to keep masses of potential troublemakers within its borders --and perhaps maliciously enjoyed Hong Kong's difficulties. The British formally urged Peking to halt the flood. The Reds may or may not have listened to the protest, but at week's end, the stream of refugees stopped abruptly. Communist border guards, who had been looking the other way for weeks, slammed shut the gate to freedom.

The Communist move caught the free world off balance: since most of the 70,000 peasants who had poured across the border had been promptly shoved back again by the British, there were now practically no refugees to rescue. What Britain, the U.S. and Formosa did have, however, was a breathing space in which to make some orderly decisions about just what could and should be done if Red China again opens the escape door to its hungry, hapless citizens.

* In Washington, Republican Senator Karl Mundt denounced Hong Kong's refusal to admit Red Chinese refugees as "one of the most atrocious acts in international history." Stung by the criticism, the Hong Kong Daily Mail publicly asked Senator Mundt what the U.S. would do if the Soviet Union suddenly allowed 300,000 hungry Russians a day to flood across the Bering Strait into U.S. territory. Senator Mundt stiffly replied that, in the event of Communist refugees flooding into the U.S., "we would receive and absorb as many as possible, and if unable to handle the problem, call on the free world to assist us." Which is precisely the course that Hong Kong adopted.

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