Many of the police are themselves refugees from Red China. They perform their antismuggling duties conscientiously, but if refugees get through despite their best efforts and vigilance, they may be something less than heartbroken.
Protection of the land border with Red China is the responsibility of the 200 uniformed men of the Frontier Division, with headquarters at Fanling, four miles south of the border. Measured in a straight line, the border is only thirteen miles long, but 22 miles as it follows a snaky line from Deep Bay in the west to Mirs Bay in the east. On the colony side, it is backed up by a closed zone which varies in depth from a few hundred yards to a mile. No one except police, farmers living in the area, or persons carrying special passes from the Commissioner of Police is allowed to enter or move about in the closed area.
Before the dramatic refugee surge of May, 1962, only nine-tenths of the border was fenced on the British side, and the stoutness of the fence was variable—high and topped with barbed wire at some places, but no more than a plain, low fence at others. The storming of the barrier in 1962 caused the British to build an entirely new one which stretched the full length of the border. Crowned with many strands of barbed wire, it stood 10 feet high and was laid out like a long cage, with 20 feet of enclosed ground between the outer, parallel fences.
Between the marshlands on the west and the hilly country in the east, the Frontier Division police have three main stations and nine police posts. From each of these, police observers scan the border with binoculars. Foot patrols also keep a continuous watch along the boundary. At night, when the closed area is under curfew, searchlights and dogs are added to the regular patrols. When the integrity of the border is as seriously threatened as it was by the spring invasion of 1962, the closed area may be increased to a depth of three miles, as Governor Black ordered on May 19, 1962.
Under normal conditions, farmers who live along the border enjoy a kind of twilight-zone immunity. Known to the patrols, they may cross the border during the day to work either in Hong Kong or China without molestation, but they must be home before nightfall, because the border, with all its rail and road connections, shuts down at dark. Night crossings, even before the 10-foot barrier went up, were discouraged by peremptory challenges and bullets.
The Reds have no fence on their side of the border. They do not need it; nobody wants to get in.
Why did the Red Chinese permit the transborder flight of May, 1962? At first it was interpreted as a deliberate attempt to embarrass the British, and certainly the colony’s police and military units had a thankless assignment. When they transported the captured refugees back to the border, they were jeered at and reviled by colony residents. Protests were issued by international relief officials.
The onus soon shifted to Red China, which was revealed by the exodus as a land of hunger. All news from Communist China is censored or second-hand, so no accurate explanation of the flight could be made at the time. It appeared, however, that industrial retrenchment in the cities of China had caused many city-dwellers to move to rural areas, perhaps to seek food, perhaps to bolster the country’s sagging farm production.
Most of those who crossed the border in the big May surge were from the adjoining province of Kwangtung, indicating that free movement of people within China was confined to this one southern area. Most of those interviewed in Hong Kong complained that they were hungry, and that they had lived on a substandard diet for months with no real hope of improvement.