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.