The effect on the Chinese in Hong Kong is irresistible; by every tradition of family loyalty they are compelled to help their starving kinsmen in China. In obedience to this obligation, the Hong Kong Chinese sent 13,000,000 two-pound packets of food and other household needs through the colony’s post office in 1961 to friends and relatives across the border.
The squeeze takes the form of customs duties which often exceed the value of the goods shipped. If the sender mails his parcel from a Hong Kong post office, the receiver in China pays the duty when it arrives. But the duty can be any amount the Red Chinese officials choose to assign, and many recipients refuse the parcels because they cannot pay for them. If a parcel agent handles the shipment, sending it through the Chinese post offices across the frontier or through his own agents inside China, the Hong Kong sender has to pay all the duties in colony currency before it starts on its way.
One Chinese resident who came to the colony in 1962 told The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong English-language daily, that the Red Chinese government was taking in about $53,000 a day on these parcel duties, with the peak of the loot coming at Chinese New Year, when presents are shipped home in the greatest numbers. A vast percentage of the parcel-senders were poor people, and each parcel cost them anywhere from a day’s to a week’s wages, or more.
The external harmony which has prevailed between the colony and the mainland since 1959 offers a glaring contrast to the discord that preceded it. Ever since 1949, the Reds have been taking angry swipes at the colony, a game in which their worst enemies, the Chinese Nationalists, frequently joined.
In the year that the Reds gained control of the mainland, trade relations and communications between China and Hong Kong were broken off. The Kowloon-Canton Railway suspended transborder operations and Communist guerrilla forces lined up threateningly along the frontier.
While the Communists pressed the colony from the north, the Nationalists launched a blockade of all ports along the Chinese coast. Caught between the opposing forces, the colony banned political societies with outside allegiance and bolstered its own defenses. Additional lands and buildings were requisitioned for military use and 900 volunteer soldiers were added to its garrison.
Great Britain sought to relieve the existing tension by recognizing Red China on February 6, 1950, but there was no exchange of diplomatic representatives. Swelling tides of Chinese refugees continued to pour across the frontier and the colony instituted its first immigration controls in May, 1950.
The initial breach in Hong Kong’s policy of cautious neutrality came on June 5, 1950, when two Nationalist warships, enforcing their own blockade against the Reds, attacked the 800-ton British merchant vessel Cheung Hing. This dreadnought, steaming along with a cargo of fertilizer from Amoy, was raked with Nationalist shells which killed six of her passengers and wounded six others.
Early in August, 1950, the Reds produced their own series of incidents. Communist gunboats fired on three British ships just outside Hong Kong territorial waters and an armed Red junk bombarded the American freighter Steel Rover. The day after the Rover incident, a Communist shore battery on Ling Ting Island, a few miles outside the southern limit of Hong Kong waters, directed its cannon and machine guns against the British freighter Hangsang, wounding two British officers. Communist forts in the same area fired on the Norwegian freighter Pleasantville on August 6, but no hits were scored.
The shootings were collectively interpreted as a Red warning to keep all Allied shipping away from her installations on Ling Ting and the nearby Lema and Ladrone islands. On August 17, the British destroyer Concord replied to the warning by exchanging a half-hour of shellfire with the Communist forts.