Since then, the winds have shifted to a new quarter. The Great Leap Forward that began in 1958 has struck a dead calm. Backyard factories and foundries have failed to attain either the standards or quantity of production anticipated, but they succeeded for a time in clogging the country’s transportation system and in interfering with the distribution of food and other consumer goods. The same confused planning that turned the emphasis from large-scale industrial production to backyard factories also transformed the traditional small Chinese farm and the medium-sized collective farm into titanic agricultural communes. By a combination of mismanagement and adverse growing conditions, the communes have brought about the worst food shortage in China’s recent history.
In the summer of 1961, the prevailing winds from Moscow turned unseasonably icy as an ideological split developed between Russia and China. No one outside the Communist partnership could assess the full significance of the break, but it offered very little prospect of increased Soviet assistance to Communist China.
Every change in the political winds of mainland China creates an eddy in Hong Kong. In the eight years when Red China was swept along by the momentum of its revolutionary spirit, the colony was beset by a succession of incidents. British ships and planes became the target for Chinese Communist guns. Long after the mainland fell under the unchallenged domination of the Reds, the grim warfare between Communists and Nationalists continued in the streets of Hong Kong.
Whether by coincidence or direct cause, the second year of the Great Leap Forward brought an unexpected lull in the Communist harassment of the colony. Left-wing agitation in the schools and trade unions persisted, but colony officials noticed that Communist sympathizers, once so avid for violent strikes and street demonstrations, seemed to have lost their appetite for both. The assumption was that Peking had told them they could expect no further support from that source. At the same time, shooting incidents and border clashes virtually ceased.
There was no disposition in the colony to regard this undeclared armistice as a bid for reconciliation. The news that the Great Leap had made its first big stumble was already in circulation, and the colony administration, quite unofficially, reached its own conclusion; Communist China was temporarily too busy mopping up its own mess to indulge its normal passion for badgering Hong Kong. When China’s house had restored order, its Communist leadership would be right back at the colony’s throat.
Hong Kong’s colonial administration has never deluded itself with the belief that it could survive a massive assault by Red China. In population and the size of its armed forces, Hong Kong is outnumbered by approximately 200 to 1. Against Japan in 1941, Hong Kong’s resistance lasted less than three weeks; against Red China, it might last about half as long.
But there are certain restraining factors unreflected in the comparative strength of the opposing land forces. The most tangible of these are the ships of the British and United States navies, continually riding at anchor in Hong Kong harbor or cruising in the surrounding seas. Aircraft carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers equipped with planes and missiles tend to put the brakes on impulsive acts of aggression by an inferior naval power.
A Communist grab for Hong Kong would almost inevitably involve Red China in a major war. Great Britain has shown no disposition to surrender this profitable possession without a fight, and although the United States has made no specific pledge to defend the colony, it is not likely to let the Chinese Communists snatch it from her principal ally.
Red China’s instinctive belligerence may be tempered by the fate of its first outright aggression, which did not keep the United Nations out of Korea, but did a great deal to keep Red China out of the United Nations for years thereafter.
Aided in part by these considerations, Hong Kong has sat since 1949 on the doorstep of a country dedicated to its destruction. In the late 1940s, it was felt that a substantial cut in the colony’s trade with China would ruin the British enclave by purely peaceful methods. Most of the trade has been lost since then, but Hong Kong has perversely grown more prosperous than ever before.