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.