Mr. Tang beat the rust problem and shaved his operating costs by keeping the machines in continuous use, running 8,500 hours a year, compared with 3,700 hours a year in German mills and 1,500 hours in English ones. He opened up new markets for his prolific output in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Africa, and elsewhere. His early sales were made at a loss, but with his markets established and Red China knocked out of the market by the U.N. embargo, South Sea sales and profits soared.
The main plant is completely air-conditioned, reducing summer working temperatures by twenty degrees. The spindles and looms, imported from Japan, England, Switzerland and the United States, are the finest obtainable. Much of the carding, combing, and sizing machinery is fully automatic, tended by Chinese girls in their early twenties. Some of the girls appear to be prematurely grey, but it’s nothing more than loose cotton that has settled on their black hair; all wear breathing masks to protect their lungs from floating cotton. Every phase of the operation is under strict quality control, preserving the uniform diameter of the yarn and testing its tensile strength.
The South Sea plant sometimes disconcerts visiting textile executives, who expect a Hong Kong textile mill to look like an over-extended cottage industry. What they find here, and in several other Hong Kong mills, is a streamlined efficiency equal to the best in the world.
The young men and women employees, most of them single, live in free dormitories near the plant, pay an average of 27 cents a day for meals and have a choice of Cantonese, Shanghai or Swatow cuisine. They have workmen’s compensation, a barber shop with electric hair-dryers for the women, a vocational training program, and for high-performance workers, a lounge and recreation center. The plant is non-union, with a six-day, 48-hour week. Wages are slightly above the colony average for a registered factory, ranging from $1.38 to $2.25 a day.
Mr. Tang has been in the thick of the fight to protect the colony’s textile industry from demands—especially clamorous in England and the United States—that its exports be reduced.
“I just can’t see the wisdom of Western powers in restricting Hong Kong textile exports,” he told David Lan, a reporter for The China Mail, a colony daily. “We have no hinterland or diversified industries to which refugees may turn from a threatened textile industry.”
“From 1959 through 1961, total colony exports of cotton piece goods were less than 5 percent of Great Britain’s production, and 0.53 percent of United States output,” he stated.
“We are asking for no aid but only a fair chance to trade,” he said.
John Tung, third of the alliterative industrial Taipans, has been connected with the colony’s metalware industry since 1937. Like Mr. Tang, he was the son of a Chinese industrialist. His father started the I. Feng Enamelling Company in Shanghai shortly after World War I and established a Hong Kong branch in 1937. John, working part-time for his father while he attended the University of Shanghai, left both school and job and founded his own firm, the Freezinhot Bottle Co., to manufacture vacuum flasks. By 1940, he, too, set up a Hong Kong branch. When the Communists expropriated Shanghai industries, he moved to the colony to direct both the I. Feng and Freezinhot branches.
The I. Feng enterprise prospered, and in the familiar Hong Kong pattern, dozens of small operators rushed in to cut some of the pie. By 1956 there were approximately 30 of them in the field and Mr. Tung had to cut back his production. The marginal companies went broke in the glutted market, but I. Feng remained the largest in its line. Mr. Tung proceeded to build the Freezinhot bottles by handling all the manufacturing processes in his own plant, instead of the usual practice of contracting them out, and successfully invaded Japanese markets in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.