The History of Hong Kong (Part 8)

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Lausley Montgomery here with another China history podcast. Today we're going to continue on with our history of Hong Kong overview. Part 8. Hong Kong is now liberated from the Japanese and it's a new beginning there. Other than inflation, a shortage of hard currency, unemployment, looting, abysmal health, and hygiene conditions, insufficient housing, intimidation from triads, and 80% of the Hong Kong people being malnourished, other than all that. The place was still standing and ready to make a quick and miraculous comeback. After eight months of military administration beginning with Cecil Harcourt in August 1945, Sir Mark Young returned to Hong Kong, landing at Queen's Pier on Mayday, 1946 to restore civil administration, and begin picking up the pieces. For those eight months prior to Young's arrival, Hong Kong had been run by the colonial secretary David Mercer McDougall, who hailed from Perth in Scotland. He had quite an interesting life. At the Battle of Hong Kong, he made a daring escape from certain death at the hands of the Japanese. He made a break with a bunch of fellow intel officers, and went on to make it to Chongqing, where the Nationalist government had reconstituted itself. McDougall later traveled the Burma Road and worked in Burma until the end of the war. McDougall was on hand when Harcourt accepted the surrender from the Japanese, and he served excellently in the interim until Governor Young was able to sit behind his desk again at government house. It was a new age in Hong Kong. First of all, the British had lost a massive amount of prestige in the eyes of the Hong Kong people when they were so quickly overwhelmed by the Japanese in 1941. The British of all people, when they sailed into Hong Kong themselves a century before, who could have ever thought in a million years these guys could be beat, that they fell so quickly, and because the suffering of the people of Hong Kong under the Japanese was so terrible, all it all reflected badly on Great Britain in general, and British rule of Hong Kong in particular. But an amazing thing happened, right after the war ended, and right after the British sort of reasserted themselves, the economy began to come back. Once the monetary and banking systems were reassembled, it had an instant impact on Hong Kong's economy and finances. This was due in part by the work carried out by Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, who were instrumental in restoring the Hong Kong currency, which was refloded at $16 Hong Kong dollars to the British pound sterling. While the rest of the world, well, not the United States so much, tried to stage some sort of a comeback from the destruction of World War II, Hong Kong had no such trouble. Considerable damage had been done during the war years, but maybe because it's such a small place, like Singapore, it was easier to bounce back. The year after the Japanese had been kicked out, the economy was booming. As for the Japanese in Hong Kong after the war, the war crimes trials sentenced to death 21 of the worst offenders, 85 were given lengthy prison sentences, 14 others were acquitted, and many others escaped any kind of prosecution. As I mentioned last episode, Sermark Young tried to take the bull by the horns and came up with a plan that called for more directly elected legislators. His plan called for the Hong Kong government, at least the legislative part, to be more democratic and allow the Hong Kong people, meaning the Hong Kong Chinese people, to have more of a say and who was elected to the government's highest offices. As I said, this didn't go down too well. It simply couldn't get enough traction and the halls of power were it mattered. It was a classic case of quiet bureaucratic resistance and behind the scenes discussions. In the end, it was believed the local Hong Kong Chinese, no matter what, were always going to side with China. There was simply no way to stop it. That's where all Hong Kong Chinese came from. Therefore, it was considered highly risky to give power to the people. What would happen to the current system? So it never happened. The British knew they'd be marginalized at the first opportunity. They saw no need to share this power yet. Governor Yang left about a year after his return. In May 1947, he was gone, and the next governor of Hong Kong was Sir Alexander Grantham. He would stay for 10 years and would be the one to oversee this post-war transformation taking place. No streets or parks named after him that I know of, although there is a Grantham hospital. As for the British and Hong Kong, it was never the same again. Those old traditional colonial attitudes that had been reluctantly accepted for 100 years, suddenly weren't so acceptable anymore. One of the first things to go was the peak ordinances that prohibited Chinese from buying property on the peak. It was a new world that emerged from the World War II years, and there was simply no going back to the pre-war society. And as far as Hong Kong was concerned, this was especially so. Where doors were closed to Chinese and commerce and government administration, suddenly they were flung wide open now. Up until World War II, Hong Kong's role in the big picture of global trade was as a trading antropo. The way it worked was China made goods, exited the country via any number of ports stretching from Dalian to Guangzhou, and Hong Kong was just one of these many ports. Because Guangdong Province had always been such a leading powerhouse of manufacturing in China, Hong Kong enjoyed a particular advantage being located adjacent to such an immense manufacturing center. This is what initially made Hong Kong. This trading, buying and selling merchandise, natural resources, foodstuffs, you name it. These Hong Kong trading companies from Jardines down to the smallest Pei Bao Gongsu brought these goods from China that were made or grown there and sold this to importers from other countries. And these Hong Kong traders also would import stuff themselves that they knew China needed and they exported to China, always acting as middlemen. Less than 30% of Hong Kong's exports to the world were actually made there. Now this dynamic was all about to change. As you may recall from the previous episode amidst all the chaos going on in China with the KMT and the communists fighting each other and millions getting caught up in the carnage. Then when the Japanese invaded, a lot of China's more entrepreneurial and ambitious factory men pulled up stakes in China and moved lock stock and forced smoking barrels to Hong Kong. And this was how Hong Kong began to take off as a manufacturing center. No longer would Hong Kong be merely an entrepreneur filled with trading companies, buying and selling. Now stuff was being made in Hong Kong. In factories scattered all over from Aberdeen to the new territories. Textiles, garments, housewares, silk flowers, watches, you name it. Made in Hong Kong was now throwing its hat in the ring. And with these factories being operated inside the territory, now these bosses were in charge of their own destiny and no longer subject to a myriad of supply issues caused by one calamity or another in China. So with the influx of all these factory bosses escaping China and fleeing to Hong Kong, where it was safer and where there were unique opportunities, you had the beginning of the soon ubiquitous made in Hong Kong label. This establishment of a manufacturing base is going to propel Hong Kong into the top ranks of global export powerhouses. It was these years, also known as the Grantham era, the late 40s and into the 50s, that Hong Kong saw a particularly massive surge of refugees coming from Shanghai. They concentrated themselves in the north point area, west of Taikou-shing and east of Causeway Bay. Need to call this area. Xiao Shanghai, or Little Shanghai because there were so many of them. Sir Run Run Shaw and his family, who he featured in CHP Episode 49, he was part of this exodus from Shanghai at this time. YK Pao, the great shipping magnet and philanthropist, who will be featuring soon as a topic on this CHP, he too came at this time. Who else came? C.C. Lee, the grandfather of Hong Kong's entire textile industry, brand new spinning equipment that he purchased from America, with all the chaos of the Civil War, raging in 1946, and inability to obtain an import license for his equipment from Jiang Kai-shek's government? Well, he couldn't get the equipment past China Customs in Shanghai, so that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, especially for Hong Kong. C.C. Lee had the machines shipped to Hong Kong instead, and set up a factory there that laid the foundation for the whole textile industry in Hong Kong. And the other Shanghai knees textile magnets of the late 1940s, who fled China for greener pastures in Hong Kong, they then built on this foundation, laid by C.C. Lee. After Shanghai was taken by the PLA in May 1949, the city abruptly went into sort of a four-decade state of hibernation. The bad old days of the 1920s and 30s Shanghai were gone for good. That lifestyle, that way of life, that society was just plowed under. And this wasn't just bad for gangsters, pimps, and everyone else involved in gambling and the skin trade. Many, plain old, hardworking, honest businessmen too, they knew of that thing when they saw it. These Shanghai capitalists packed up all their machines, technology, and anything else they could carry, and off to Hong Kong they went. And this provided the kindling wood to light the bonfire that would make Hong Kong an industrial and manufacturing global powerhouse. And you surely remember from episode CHP61 covering the first 12 months of the PRC, almost as soon as the communists set themselves up in China, the Korean War broke out. And this would ultimately lead to a US-led blockade that spelled the end of Hong Kong as a window to the outside world for China. The place had been sealed shut and there was going to be no way to carry out any trade with China. In 1949, not everyone believed in the communist dream for a new China. So many people in China bailed and it was to Hong Kong that they came. Most of them becoming the working poor who were part of the Maiden Hong Kong miracle happening in all these industrial estates. It wasn't just these entrepreneurs who made things happen, it was the formula of the manufacturers and the bottomless pool of cheap but skilled and hardworking labor pouring in from China. And those bad old days right after the war and into the 1950s, those factories in Hong Kong were total sweatshops of the worst kind. There were no worse than those in England during the Industrial Revolution. Cheap labor poured in regularly and there was never any shortage of asses to sit on on stools, 18 hours a day at mill to make any number of household items for export. There was plenty of concern in 1949 that Chairman Mao was going to seize Hong Kong back. This was one of the fears of the day. PLA troops were down there and certainly if they wanted to, they could have just crossed the border at law woo and just walled still just like the Japanese had done in December of 1941. As tense as it got sometimes, nothing ever happened. Ever. Actually, the PLA never needed to invade Hong Kong in order to take it over. I wanted to interject something here regarding a little-known October 1954 visit Alexander Grantham made at the invitation of Joe and Lai. This was an unofficial visit even though Grantham at the time was the governor of Hong Kong. Joe was already a world-renowned political figure and a revolutionary in every sense of the word. That Joe and Lai, ahead of state, would meet with someone like Grantham who came with all the colonial baggage of British capitalism and imperialism, is rather extraordinary. In this three hour meeting, Joe and Lai and Grantham discussed Hong Kong's municipal administration and it's believed by no small number of scholars that much of the stability generally enjoyed by Hong Kong until 1982, surely was built on the agreements reached at this meeting. Grantham knew post-1949, Hong Kong could only exist as long as China was disposed to allow it to do so. Its believed Joe gave Grantham a list of conditions to be met for China allowing the status quo in Hong Kong to continue. And most of what Joe asked for were already policies of the Grantham government. Even in his memoirs, Grantham does not mention the substance of the meeting. If you scour the internet, there are references to this meeting, but officially, at least, it never happened. Joe informed Grantham that China expected the Hong Kong government to maintain public order, not to allow the nationalists to use the places of base for subversion against the mainland, not to allow foreign powers to use it as a military base or a base for plotting against the mainland, and that China's economic interests should not be obstructed. In last but not least, Hong Kong had to remain a safe place for Chinese officials and local comrades. And lastly, Joe wanted to make sure there were no attempts made in the direction of giving Hong Kong people any elected or representative government. There seems to have been one area of disagreement, and that was a request that China be allowed to station an official representative in Hong Kong. Grantham's replies alleged to have been that there's only room for one governor in Hong Kong, and there the matter rested. From this meeting, the British side obtained from China a de facto recognition of their presence in Hong Kong, and at the same time, the nature of the meeting implied an acknowledgement by the British side that their presence was temporary and ultimate sovereignty resided with China. In the years following this unofficial summit between Grantham and Joe, there would be a number of incidents where the Hong Kong government's ability to maintain public order was tested. Terror had to be maintained, but how order was maintained, keeping the PRC in mind and how they went about doing it, was handled in the context of this Joe Grantham meeting of 1954. The policies pursued by the Hong Kong and British governments, post-1954, were invariably guided by what was seen to have been agreed to on that day. The words uttered by the British foreign office in December 1948 about living in Hong Kong being comparable to living on the edge of a volcano, still rang true in the 1950s and 60s. Since the opium wars, the uneasy relationship between Hong Kong and China had always been one of mutual benefit, regardless of the historical baggage. Having Hong Kong was actually much better than not having Hong Kong. Not only was this true from a government and diplomatic standpoint, but also from the common people as well. It wasn't just the entrepreneurial class and workers who fled to Hong Kong who prospered. The other less mentioned beneficiaries of Hong Kong were the relatives of those who had gone to live in Hong Kong. These hardworking, industrious common folk who came to Hong Kong became a godsend to their China relatives back in the old country who not only received money, but more importantly, things that were unobtainable in the PRC after 1949 and into the 50s and 60s. If you are a relative in Hong Kong, you were considered lucky. By March of 1950, Hong Kong's population was around 2,360,000. The Civil War was over and the state of affairs with the KMT fleeing to Taiwan was just in its infancy. While the violence and fighting may have stopped, the Civil War continued, and what Berlin became for the allies and the Soviets, that's what Hong Kong became between the Nationalists and Taiwan and the Communists on the mainland. Secret agents were all over the place, even the CIA. Having Hong Kong to operate in, right on the border with the PRC who, back then, was our arch-anemy, this was a bananza as far as intelligence was concerned. Not many people know this, but the US government, especially the CIA and the US military. They really leaned on the British as far as Hong Kong was concerned. The newly-improved, brash, post-war American frame of mind was really making itself hurt and they leaned hard on Governor Grantham as far as what they wanted him to do whenever American interests were concerned, which was, in just about everything. So the British government and Hong Kong always had the Americans leaning hard on them and, of course, the British wanted to show they were on board with everything the Americans wanted. But at the same time, they had to tell their American partners, "Hey, man, I got a deal with these guys to the north. If I do this for you, then I'm going to catch heat from Chairman Mao." They really walked a tight rope trying to please and manage the diplomacy of both the U.S. and China. For example, in 1957, after all this talk had been going around the highest levels and Great Britain about giving the PRC a seat at the United Nations, well, Eisenhower cut a deal with Selwyn Lloyd, British Foreign Secretary at the time, which basically said, "Will end a helping hand to Hong Kong with our far-reast military might, and ensure Hong Kong security, and you, Great Britain, you lay off any of this crazy talk about giving Chairman Mao a seat at the UN." And they shook hands on this. Stuff like this happened all throughout the '50s and into the '60s. And Governor Grant them always had to listen to the Chinese propaganda that accused the British of allowing the American imperialists to use Hong Kong as a base from which to spy on China, and of course, of the Brits being "stuages of the Americans." I guess the British were rightfully freaking out that Mao had prevailed on the mainland, and the U.S. government wanted to make sure they could get the full benefit of Hong Kong's strategic location in the south of China, so close to one of China's largest cities, Guangzhou, and this is going to cause all kinds of conflicts and kerfluffles, like you can't imagine between the United States and Great Britain. Man, the shoe sure was on the other foot now, 180 years before, Britain was the colonial master of the U.S. and now, in the 1950s, the Americans were bossing the British around. Under Grant them a whole slew of changes happened. As I said, the doors were flung open for positions in the government administration and civil service, and the government carried out a vigorous policy of local recruitment. Grant them at the face the problem of all the refugees who flooded into Hong Kong, particularly right after the fall of Canton or Guangzhou in October 1949. After that happened, there were another extra 700,000 miles to feed in Hong Kong, and where were all these people going to live? I'll tell you where, if they didn't have money or rich relatives to look after them, these newly arrived Chinese lived in these shantytowns in the hills and open spaces, wherever they could find a hundred square feet to call their own. Christmas Day, 1953, a bad day for the residents living in the squatter villages and Shekkip Mei, 53,000 people were left homeless after a fire raged through one of the bigger shantytowns. The fire killed some, but not many, but the 53,000 homeless and the cold, wet December of Hong Kong was a major headache for the Hong Kong government, not to mention all of those who lived through the tragedy. How did Grant them deal with this problem? This is where the whole idea of the housing estates began. Thus was born the first ever public housing estate, the Shekkip Mei estate. Today, Shekkip Mei estate consists of 26 apartment blocks, 7363 units, ranging in size from about 110 to 550 square feet. This was Hong Kong's first government housing estate. Now mind you when they first went up, many outsiders who saw them consider these apartments glorified prison cells. Yeah, they weren't so pretty back then and were meant to serve a kind of utilitarian purpose more than anything else. What people got was, as one observer put it, quote, "a concrete box allowing 24 square feet ahead in a seven-story structure with no lifts, no windows, but wooden shutters, no water, but access to communal kitchens and bathrooms. If this sounds dreadful, it was, but such was the alternative that people fought to get into the new blocks where you had your own place legally and it would not burn down." This wasn't a bad idea, taking all this sprawl over, so much land and stacking it up in these high rises. This opened up a lot of good land for developers, and wherever land developers went, "Oh, there was plenty of revenue generated for the government coffers, win, win." The Hong Kong government aggressively embarked on social welfare schemes and in education. They did this through the auspices of existing social welfare agencies and, of course, many of the churches and other religious institutions were called upon by the government to assist in the organizing and execution of some services. These resettlement projects, of which these massive housing estates were the centerpiece, brought a degree of comfort and integration into Hong Kong society for hundreds of thousands of newly arrived Chinese. Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the man called upon to lead the charge for the post-war urban planning in London, delivered a report upon his visit to Hong Kong in 1947. The bullet points Abercrombie gave, as far as his recommendations for Hong Kong, were to pay attention to zoning, to build more wide open spaces, remove traces of the military from central, and last but not least, Abercrombie suggested to build some sort of a cross-harbour tunnel. And anyone familiar with Hong Kong today can see all of these proposals from Abercrombie were taken to heart. Today, there are three cross-harbour tunnels for cars and for the red and purple lines of the MTR subway system and the lines to the airport in Lantau, and no one can complain that there are not enough parks and wide open spaces to escape the sprawl and the overcrowding. This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time, and Granger helps him stay prepared. So shipping supplies, to PPE, to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift, call 1-800-GRanger, click-ranger.com or just stop by, Granger, for the ones who get it done. Into the 1950s and 60s, the working poor, toiled away the hours of these factories. It became such a common fact of life to be involved in this world. You know, most of these factories were not these huge, or well-earned, metropolis-type giant factories with assembly lines and a thousand workers. The overwhelming majority of these Hong Kong factories were small operations employing 50-100 workers. Many more were even smaller, and it wasn't just the workers who got in on the game. And just like you have in China today, back in the 1950s and 60s, Hong Kong developed an entire layer of subcontractors. And these subcontractors, well, they didn't speak a word of English, and could never dream of selling anything to anyone who didn't speak Cantonese. Their world was to supply semi-finished parts and peacework to a much bigger factory who couldn't be bothered with such labor-intensive handwork. Some factory who made ladies' blouses, for example, well, he might have an order for some blouse with some fancy ribbon and bow pinned to it or some embellishment. Now maybe for this factory guy, to take the time to tie these ribbons might slow him down or perhaps with some step in the production that required a particularly higher degree of hand labor. The factory might go to some guy he knows, maybe a relative, maybe someone introduced to him, and this guy specialized in tying ribbons and bows, and he did this handwork at his sweatshop somewhere, and when he was done he delivered the semi-finished goods to the factory who took this and finished off the blouse, and then a way it went, made in Hong Kong. And just like now, nobody was regularly checking up on these thousands and thousands and thousands of small subcontractors. This is where entire Hong Kong families would get in on the game. Not only would mom and pop do this kind of stuff at their day jobs at the factory, it was entirely common to bring work back home, and all the able-bodied kids in the family and grandma too, if she could, would help out. This was pure, unadulterated, child labor. But this is what people in Hong Kong did in the 50s and 60s, and having the whole family helping out was just the thing that was done in that culture. When the chips were down, everyone stuck together and weathered the hardship together. And if it meant brothers and sisters ten years old, sitting around the apartment after dinner, tying bows or gluing rhinestones or counting tiny things and putting them in small boxes, whatever. The family had to survive, and this was just one way they did it, and this whole network that evolved to factories and subcontractors, providing that solid fuel that powered the rocket, that led to so much of the prosperity in Hong Kong, and made the place a force to reckon with. One of the upshots of all this, however, was that the labor movement remained weak and toothless. And all the people who fought for workers' rights and safety, pay and benefits was such an endless supply of labor flowing in from China all the time, always willing to work for peanuts, and the labor movement always faced an uphill struggle. But by 1971, bare in mind, the hunk. Hong Kong Factory worker was ranked second in Asia as far as Standard Living went. Hong Kong society was no longer dominated by British tycoons and bankers and government officials, a combination of Hong Kong's middle class or upper middle class, however you want to call it, along with all these rich Chinese industrialists who were the anchors of Hong Kong industry combined to become a rather formidable force. The days during the times of the old governors, bowering, Robinson, Macdonald, Kennedy, Hennessey, those days when the British truly did lord it over the Chinese and Hong Kong, those days couldn't have been more over. And looked at from the prism of where Hong Kong was in the 50s and 60s, they seemed quite anachronistic. Besides all this, there was the whole matter of Hong Kong's relationship with China. It is Britain's relationship with China. For Britain in the 1950s, there was no more Dao Guang or Guangxiu emperors to deal with. Now it was Chairman Mao on the Dragon Throne, so to speak. China wasn't as powerful as they are today, but nonetheless. The British government knew the old tried and true playbook of propping up a week and rotting government and exploiting it for a national gain had to be thrown out. They actually Britain knew all this and they bent over backwards to show the CCP they meant no harm and had every intention to be a good neighbor down in the South. A lot of symbolic steps and actions were taken to give certain authorities and power to China regarding sensitive issues that concerned both Hong Kong and China. Britain was one of the first non-war sawpact nations to recognize the PRC, doing so in February of 1950. The interesting thing about the relationship between China and Hong Kong was that, even though the place was a British colony or territory they were now calling it, China considered the matter of Hong Kong as a domestic matter, rather than as a foreign policy matter. Hong Kong had its uses now, as it had from the earliest founding days of the CCP. The Korean War that began in June 1950 created all manners of diplomatic complications for the British with respect to Hong Kong. The British, of course, were part of the UN force fighting the Chinese and the frozen Korean peninsula. British diplomats really had to work overtime during that time to keep the pot from boiling over with China until things quieted down in July 1953. But during that Korean War period, as I said, the UN and the US slapped an embargo on trade with China, in Hong Kong being a part of Britain at all, they had to comply also. But as I explained, as soon as this embargo that could have meant curtains for Hong Kong came into force, along comes the birth of Hong Kong industrial might to rescue the economy and the people's livelihoods. Into the 1960s, the progress Hong Kong made in industry was having a rather large effect on Hong Kong society. Although workers didn't get what could be called a living wage, a lot of people were working. And the way it was, within the Cantonese family, everyone stuck together and looked out for one another. So even though you weren't bringing in a big income, one always had that family safety net under them. So you could say society was doing well. For sure, it was more pleasant in Hong Kong than in China. In the decades of the 1960s, opened with a horrific and deadly famine that came as a result of the Great Leap Forward. And this brought in more refugees who were escaping for their lives. 150,000 refugees came in 1962 alone. Hong Kong's population in the 60s hovered around 3 million. Thanks to Sir Run Run Shaw, the Shaw Brothers, and all the other Hong Kong entertainment moguls, there was plenty to watch on TV, and this provided endless distraction from the rigors of life. Connie Chan was a huge TV and movie star of the day and all the rage back in the 1960s. Hong Kong TV came into its own during this time. Most of you have seen or at least heard of the book made into a 1960 Hollywood movie called The World of Suzy Wang. This starred a 42-year-old William Holden together with a 21-year-old Nansi Kuan, Guanchiacin. Nansi Kuan was born in Hong Kong to a Chinese father and a Scottish mother. She grew up in Kaolun Tong and went through all the traumas of the Japanese occupation and the civil war as a young child. She had a very complicated childhood, but she had the looks and the talent and got herself spotted at the right time. The novel by Richard Mason was a big hit around the world, but the movie, besides making Nansi Kuan a household name back then and for many years after, it did wonders for boosting Hong Kong's image as an international, swinging hip, exotic location filled with all the wonders of Chinese culture and of course, beautiful, innocent local women just dying to be swept up by some dashing guailo, I mean foreigner. The Beatles arrived in Hong Kong, June 8, 1964. There they played two shows at the Princess Theatre in Chim Sa Joy. The Princess Theatre, well it isn't around anymore, it was torn down and today the site is occupied by the Miramar Hotel on Nathan and Kimberly Rhodes. The hotel the Beatles stayed at isn't there anymore either. They stayed at the old Hyatt Regency on Nathan, which back in the Beatle Mania days was the newly opened President Hotel. The fab four played two shows on June 9, neither of them sold out because the ticket prices at $75 Hong Kong dollars was about a week's pay for the average working stiff and Ringo, by the way, didn't make it to Hong Kong as he was sick for this part of the tour. This was the brief window where Jimmy Nichol filled in for Ringo, writing himself into the history books. The Chinese language press totally panned the performance and pretty much like everywhere the Beatles played in Asia, they were considered a corrupting influence on the youth of the day. As a quick sidebar to this sidebar back in 1964, in order for John Paul George and Jimmy Nichol to get to Hong Kong from London, they had to make fueling stops in Zurich, Beirut, Karachi, Calcutta, and Bangkok, there were no nonstoppers back then. Writer and James Bond creator Ian Fleming, he wrote of Hong Kong in the 1960s that it was "the most vivid and exciting city I have ever seen, offering comfort in a theatrically oriental setting." It was a gay and splendid colony, humming with vitality and progress, knowing that 650 million Communist Chinese or a few miles away across the frontier seems only to add zest to the excitement at all levels of life in the colony. And from the governor down, if there was an underlying tension, there was certainly no dismay. Obviously, China could take Hong Kong by a snap of its giant fingers, but China has shown no signs of wishing to do so. Whatever the future holds, there was no sign that a sinister doom-fraught countdown is in progress, end quote. Fleming here is referring to the countdown to July 1, 1997, when the lease on the new territories would expire. Things weren't all peaceful and rosy in Hong Kong during the '60s. There were riots in 1966 that covered three days of protest. It all began when the Hong Kong government proposed raising fears on the Star Ferry 25 percent from 20 cents to 25 cents. Back then, the Star Ferry was the only way to get from Kaolun to Hong Kong Island. Hong Kong was still seven years away from opening up the first Cross-Harvard tunnel, which took you from Hong Hong to Causeway Bay. I guess the theme of today's China History Podcast episode is the rise and dominance of Hong Kong industrial might and what it meant for Hong Kong. You see, this is all linked together with the 1966 riots, not to be confused with the bigger and more famous 1967 riots, which we'll get to next time. As Hong Kong manufacturing grew, it brought in all kinds of money into the territory. The problem was that although Hong Kong was booming, workers' wages were remaining flat. You know the problem, too much labor, too many Hong Kong people already, and more arriving every day from China, so there was never a moment like you have today in China where suddenly labor wasn't plentiful enough. In China today, it's not so easy to find workers to keep these factories humming. No such luck for Hong Kong workers in the 1960s. They still worked for the same peanuts as always. It seemed okay in the 1950s. After all, those were such extraordinary times, the blowback from the Civil War, the Korean War, persecution of intellectuals and capitalists, the Great Leap Forward, the famine. But now it was the swinging 60s man and the common Hong Kong workers were seeing all these same changes as everyone else and all these nice things in life, and they didn't have no 75 Hong Kong dollars to go see the Beatles at the Princess Theatre. This class of society was barely making ends meet and not getting their meager rations of Hong Kong's economic and industrial miracle. Over half of the world. million squatters were still living on the hill-sides of Kaolun. This and all the income disparity, lousy working conditions, zero political representation, and discussed at the government corruption. There already was this slow boil of discontent, already simmering. So when word got out, as it always did in Hong Kong, that people who used the star fairy to get to work had to face another 25% increase. Oh, they went crazy. 25% increase coming and going. What the? Actually, the government wanted to raise it even higher. So April 4th, 1966, a guy named So-Sao Zhong, or "Sucho Zhong" in Mandarin, he got the ball rolling when he sat his ass down at the star fairy terminal on the central side and began a hunger strike. He famously wore a vest that said, "Hail LC, join the hunger strike to block the fair increase." Now for those of you who are not familiar with Hong Kong, the star fairy terminal and central in the old days before the IFC and Exchange Square was about as public of a place as you could get in all of Hong Kong. It was akin to Grand Central Station in New York City, yet a lot of people coming and going at all hours of the day. So Mr. So got maximum value for his protest and I guess the timing was right in 1966. People by that time who were watching all this prosperity going on right before their eyes finally reached a point where they had had enough and the idea of protesting this fair increase caught fire quickly. Hail LC, that was LC Eliot they were talking about. Those who lived in Hong Kong in the 80s and 90s remember her as LC too. Why was Mr. So wearing this vest with the words "Hail LC" on it? Mrs. Eliot too, who may I preface this by saying she was ranked by a 1993 South China Morning Post poll as Hong Kong's most widely admired personality? She was a nice old lady from Newcastle who moved to Hong Kong in 1951 at the age of 38. And for decades until she retired from public service LC too fought against government corruption against the triads and for fair treatment of workers and against colonialism. She set up a school for children living in the shanty towns of Guentong in 1954 and served as the principal. This is the kind of work she did. Nothing flashy, just trying to help the poor. And she drifted into politics. When the whole star fairy rate increase thing came up, she fought against it. She went out into the hood and drummed up 20,000 signatures on a petition against the fair increase. The government felt, "What? 5 cents? What's the big deal?" And LC too, well back then she was still LC Eliot but she knew this was a big deal and meant 50 cents a week extra out of the pockets of people who lived a life where every penny counted. She even flew to London to complain. When the vote came up in government only LC voted against it, the loan dissenter. That's why Mr. So was hailing LC. So 1966 riots had happened real fast. Mr. So and a familiar scene we've read about for so many decades was of course arrested and sentenced which led to more outbreaks of protest. And April 6th right there on Nathan Road, riots broke out and protesters threw rocks at buses and vehicles were set alight. The police station in Yamada was attacked by a mob. And this led to the usual police show of force complete with tear gas and everything. In 1966 Hong Kong still lacked a free-to-air local TV channel. And the movies were a very popular source of entertainment with the late show invariably attracting full houses. Every night around 11.30 p.m. patrons would spill out onto the streets significantly swelling foot traffic and Mongkok, Yamada, Jim Sa Joy, you know where most of the movie theaters were located. Most cinema patrons at that hour tended to be young people and on that night as they made their way out they would have been confronted with unprecedented scenes of public disorder. Perhaps some might have held views on the Star Ferry price rise but the Hooligan element would also have been well represented or some may not have been Hooligans but were merely swept away by the excitement of all this but this sudden influx of young people on the streets at that time made an already very difficult situation worse for the police. By then cars had been set alight on Nathan Road which was completely blocked as many buses had been abandoned by their drivers following attacks by rock throwing protesters who also attempted to set the buses alight. The situation was chaotic and a curfew was imposed and the army was called out to assist although they were mainly deployed on static roadblock duties and by 2 a.m. some calm had been restored. A curfew was imposed at 7 p.m. the following night but by 9.30 p.m. again. Some crowds gathered in the Moncoc and Yamadei areas and there were clashes with anti-riot police as well as instances of arson and looting. Shortly after 11.30 p.m. a looter was shot dead by police in Calhoun and Dundas Street near the junction of Nathan Road in Moncoc. Whether because of this shooting or perhaps merely by coincidence the outbreaks along Nathan Road died down shortly after midnight and at last order was restored. And then again on the evening of April 8th another curfew was declared but it was a generally uneventful night although police now freed from riot suppression duties did take the opportunity to make a number of arrests and the usual suspects were rounded up, 669 and all. The army had been called in to deal with this so you had uniform soldiers with fixed bayonets on their rifles right there on the streets of Jimsajoy, Jordan, Yamadei and Moncoc. The curfew was lifted on April 10th and this tempest in a teapot simmered down. In the end as a result of these 1966 riots 258 protesters received prison sentences of up to two years and several million dollars in damage was done in the mayhem. And despite all the protest and the riots that followed and despite Elsie Elliott's two's best efforts, the fair increase went through anyway and that was that. Elsie also got herself censured by the government for provoking the whole incident and from that point on was viewed as a classic political troublemaker. So Hong Kong dodged a bullet with this riot. It lasted less than a week and was contained rather quickly. Next time when we pick up in part 9 of this Hong Kong history series, we'll look at the 1966 riots more famous brother, the 1967 riots. That was an incident that anyone born say 1960 or later in Hong Kong might remember quite vividly. So that will be saved for next time and once we finish with the 67 riots, it's on to the 70s, 80s and we'll finish off in 1997, like I said. For now, as usual, this is your humble narrator, Lausley Montgomery, coming to you from the easternmost edge of Los Angeles County, a special shout out to Martin in the fabulous nation of Australia for his assistance with this episode. I thank you all for listening and if I was able to keep your interest enough, then I hope I'll see you next time, perhaps for another exciting episode of the China History Podcast. [Music]