Big Troubles in Little Hong Kong: Unrepresentative Government and Civil Unrest in a British Colony in the Shadow of Communist China

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Inter-ethnic relations, Regional History
Rioting in Sham Shui Po, Kowloon, 1956 (source: simtang / gwulo.com)

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Social unrest has been the norm in Hong Kong over the last decade as we’ve witnessed the clash between the centre and the the periphery, between mainland China and the people (or at least a very significant chunk of the people) of its regained territory. Such polarisation and disharmony is hardly without precedence in Hong Kong however as a cursory glance at the postwar history of this long-existing Pacific colonial outpost of the British Empire reveals. Confrontation between the state as represented by the colonial government and its unrepresented Chinese citizens has erupted and spilt over into violent rioting and conflict on several occasions.

Double-10th riots (photo: scmp.com)

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“Double Tenth” Riots, 1956
In the 1950s tensions developed between right wing pro-Kuomintang settlers (many of which had fled to the British colony(𝒶) following the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949) and pro-CCP inhabitants of Hong Kong. What triggered the riots that erupted in 1956 was to observers an act of “petty officialdom”. In the middle of National Day celebrations, an official tore down a Republic of China flag and decorations in a resettlement estate in the city. Enraged Nationalists railed against the police trying to defuse the tense situation but this eventually escalated into widespread rioting by the pro-KMT protesters with gang members joining in…attacks on property, arson attempts, looting, violence against the local police and against leftist workers and trade unionists across North Kowloon and Tsuen Wan. With the HK Police overwhelmed by the rioting the colonial secretary Edgeworth B David (acting on behalf of the governor Alexander Grantham) responded by bringing in a British army unit which eventually quelled the disturbances using force. Although brief in duration the riots resulted in 59 dead (including the wife of the Swiss vice consul) and around 500 injured. Although the Nationalist agents in the riots were politically motivated in their actions, another dynamic in the riots represented protests from the anti-communist refugees forced into overcrowded living conditions and blaming Chinese politics for “forcing them into Hong Kong in the first place”. (Wordie).

(photo: toursbylocals.com)

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Star Ferry Riots, 1966
The Star Ferry riots in 1966 started innocuously enough with a peaceful protest by commuters against the government’s decision to allow the company to increase fares for the cross-harbour journey by 25%(𝒷). As with what occurred ten years earlier, a heavy-handed reaction by the authorities to a minor kerfuffle provoked many Hong Kongers, especially its youth, to protest en mass which led in turn to widescale rioting and looting in Kowloon with police stations and other public facilities attacked and fire-bombed. The police fired tear gas into the crowds. Again, British forces were parachuted in to forcibly impose and maintain a curfew in the city. As a consequence of the disorder and rioting one rioter was shot and killed by police, dozens were injured and over 200 imprisoned.

Hill-side squatter huts, Tai Hang, 1965 (photo: Ko Tim-keung)

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1966, beginning of civic activism
The 1966 riots lacked the involvement of Chinese Triad gangs and rightist KMT malcontents that had been part of the 1956 troubles. Underlying its eruption was a widening disaffection of residents with the status quo in 1960s Hong Kong…in part it can be seen as a protest against the widening discrepancy in HK society between rich and poor and the appalling living and working conditions the masses had to contend with (overcrowding, ongoing housing dilemma, etc.), and a manifestation of the public distrust engendered by the corruption of officialdom and police.

Protesting tram workers clash with HK police, 1967

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The 1967 Riots
The 1966 riots produced perhaps the colony’s first large-scale social movement, however they were a prelude for a much more serious disturbance to Hong Kong society just one year later. What started as a minor industrial dispute involving workers at a plastic flowers factory in San Po Kong, striking over unreasonable work conditions, escalated into full-blown demonstrations, protests and violence by the Chinese inhabitants against the “iniquities” of British colonial rule with the HK governor David Trench taking a hard line with the malcontents.

Military patrol streets after Macau riots, Dec 1966 (Video, Papa Osmubal Archive)

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Spillover from the Cultural Revolution and the Macau disturbances
The political climate in Communist China at the time—Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was very much on the upswing—played its part in stirring the pot of discontent among left-leaning Hong Kongers and emboldening them to defy their imperial masters. Another source of inspiration for the leftist rioters was the recent success of their counterparts in nearby Macau (themselves encouraged by the energy of the Cultural Revolution) in what became known as the 12-3 Incident. Conflict between the Chinese and the Portuguese authorities, brewing since July 1966, exploded at the end of the year…a dispute over a school building project triggered a series of Macau Chinese protests and rioting with the active participation of Mao’s Red Guards against corruption and colonialism in Macau. The Portuguese colonial police’s violent response to the Chinese protestors resulted in eight deaths and over 200 injuries. Under pressure from Chinese business owners and Beijing Macau’s Portuguese governor was forced into a humiliating public apology for the police crackdown and had to accede to the protestors’ demands. Consequently the balance of power in Macau was altered totally and irrevocably: Red China now had de facto suzerainty over the colony, reducing Portugal’s role in its governance to a nominal one only(𝒸).

Riot police using tear gas against 1967 protestors (photo: scmp.com)

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Smouldering Pearl
As the Hong Kong riots gathered momentum the demonstrators resorted first to strikes and property damage, then to the indiscriminate use of home-made bombs (branded by the government as “urban terrorism”). Governor Trench took a hardline in retailiation, imposing martial law in the colony, responding with tear gas and raiding the pro-CCP protestors’ strongholds like North Point. Whitehall took a laissez-faire approach to the 1967 riots leaving its management to the HK administration and the local police. The terrorist strategy adopted by leftist protestors—random bomb attacks coupled with some targeted assassinations—had the effect of alienating them from the majority of Hong Kong Chinese. By October 1967 Beijing had had enough, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the Communist protestors to halt the bombing campaign, and by the end of the year things were quiet again in the colony. The riots resulted in 51 dead, 832 injured, numerous arrests and some provocateurs deported to China.

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Trampling the seeds of democratisation
1967 witnessed the bloodiest, most violent riots in Hong Kong’s colonial history. The trauma of a succession of riots in the 1950s and 60s demonstrated one thing, the desperate need for reform of the political system and institutions in Hong Kong. While there was some labour reform and social improvements in the colony as a consequence of the 1967 unrest, overall HK governors overall contributed very little to this cause. One exception to this was Mark Young (governor in the 1940s) whose Young Plan called for wider political participation by creating a new Municipal Council to give the populace a greater stake in the colony. However Young’s plan was sabotaged when his successor Grantham opposed its implementation and it was blocked by the Legislative Council, never getting off the drawing board. Instead, it wasn’t until after 1984 with Hong Kong’s fate post-1997 firmly settled that HK governments made any overtures at all in that direction, by that time the horse has bolted!(𝒹).

Endnote: Chinese takeover of Hong Kong?
At the height of the 1967 riots rumours were circulating in the colony that China was planning to seize Hong Kong, to which the current hostilities were a prequel. There had been such a plan however the top echelons of the Chinese regime had never seriously countenanced it. Beijing was content with adding to the HK authorities’ internal troubles by despatching Chinese villagers over the border into the New Territories to launch attacks on police stations…for Beijing it was not the time for anything more. Perhaps it was as one observer noted, “the Chinese had no desire to take over Hong Kong at that time in their history…their proxy intervention had been no more than a demonstration” (Jan Morris, Hong Kong). And a test! It’s plausible that Beijing through its proxies was testing the HK regime to see if it would bow to pressure as the Portuguese Macau authorities did six months earlier. Ironically, at the height of the riots, Whitehall investigated evacuating Hong Kong altogether but the idea was strongly opposed by Governor Trench and the British Army command in Hong Kong on the grounds that it was deemed logistically too hard to pull off. A further objection was the danger to British citizens in the crown colony if a full-on evacuation was attempted (Yep).

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(𝒶) along with a criminal element affiliated with the KMT

(𝒷) the actual trigger for the riots was the spontaneous action of one HK vicenarian—inspired by urban councillor Elsie Elliott who dissented from the price hike decision and organised a petition against it—to stage a hunger strike at the TST terminal of the Star Ferry

(𝒸) the Chinese Communists subsequently moved to eliminate all pockets of Kuomintang influence from Macau

(𝒹) Governor Murray MacLehose was also of a reforming bent but he focused more on eradicating police corruption (establishing an ICAC) than on institutional reform

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Articles consulted:

‘What sparked Hong Kong’s Double Tenth riots’, Jason Wordie, South China Morning Post, 07-Aug-2016, www.amp.scmp.com

‘Fifty years on: The riots that shook Hong Kong in 1967’, Foreign Correspondents Club, 18-May-2017, www.fcchk.org

‘Whose Sound and Fury? The 1967 Riots of Hong Kong through The Times, Haipeng Zhou, global media journal.com

Yep, Ray. “The 1967 Riots in Hong Kong: The Diplomatic and Domestic Fronts of the Colonial Governor.” The China Quarterly, no. 193 (2008): 122–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20192167.

Same Year, Same Subject Matter: Cinematic Happenstances

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Performing arts, Popular Culture

With hundreds and hundreds of feature films being churned out of Hollywood every year, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise too much when two separate and unrelated production companies find themselves working on a version of the same thing. Nonetheless it does seem something of an oddity, or at least a novelty, when it does occur, which isn’t very often in cinema history.

Source: pastposters.com

At least three instances of identical subjects being simultaneously made into features spring to mind. Who doesn’t know that the mythical or semi-mythical (depending on your point of view) English hero of Medieval fable and legend, Robin Hood, has been the subject of American and British feature films almost too many times to count? Ever since the early days of silent movies the silver screen (and later the TV screen) has been awash with iterations of Robin and his Lincoln green-daubed coterie of “Merry Men” locking horns with the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sir Guy of Gisborne and other assorted knaves and villains. But in the year 1991 moviegoers got two Robin Hood sagas🄰 to choose from, a big budget Hollywood number, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner in the eponymous role. In a film stolen by Alan Rickman’s outrageously over-the-top, campy Sheriff of Nottingham🄱, apple pie American Costner’s non-attempt as an appropriate English accent was a talking point of the film. The behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt was that his initial plan to try to pull off a passable English accent was vetoed by the director (‘Actors who gave up on accents halfway through a movie’, Ben Falk, Yahoo, 13-Nov-2020, www.uk.movies.yahoo.com).

𝕐𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕔𝕙𝕠𝕚𝕔𝕖 𝕠𝕗 𝕒𝕔𝕖 𝕓𝕠𝕨𝕞𝕒𝕟: 𝔹𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕤𝕙 𝕠𝕣 ℂ𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕟𝕚𝕒𝕟 ℝ𝕠𝕓𝕚𝕟?

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Flashy ‘Prince of Thieves’ vs gritty, shadowy ‘Robin Hood’
The other 1991 RH vehicle, simply entitled Robin Hood, a UK production, was a smaller scale, more modest affair than ‘Prince of Thieves’. The two filmic versions—Hollywood vs Britain, Kevin Costner vs Patrick Bergin—were expected to go head-to-head in a battle at the box-office, but this was averted when the producers of the UK Robin Hood decided to send their version straight to cable (Fox) TV.

A surprising lack of rivalry existed between the two concurrently-working production teams. Because a number of the shoot locations were reasonably close to each other (Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, West Yorkshire, North Wales) there was a good bit of collaboration, eg, crew swaps between each movie’s SFX and stunt teams (‘The Surprise Cooperation between 1991’s two Robin Hood films’, Dan Cooper, Film Stories, 09-Apr-2021, www.filmstories.co.uk).

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𝔻𝕦𝕖𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕘 ℍ𝕒𝕣𝕝𝕠𝕨𝕤: ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕠𝕝 𝕧 ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕝𝕝

𓃯𓃯𓃯

Two films about Hollywood’s original “Platinum Blonde”
1965 saw the release of two biopics about Jean Harlow, star Hollywood actress and screen sex symbol of the 1930s, both were titled simply Harlow. The first, a Magna Distribution Corp TV biopic starred Carol Lynley in the titular role and the second, from Paramount released five weeks later with a budget more than double. Carroll Baker played the Thirties sex siren. Magna and Paramount subsequently countersued each other alleging unfair competition. Both movies were critical and box office failures with nary a good word to say by anyone about either of them…DVD Talk summed them up as “two smutty movies” with little resemblance to the real Jean Harlow (‘Harlow (1965) v Harlow (1965)’, www.realtoldmovies.blogspot.com).

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Dual Doomsday message
The third concurrent double act on the screen has the most interesting relationship. In 1964 Hollywood made two Cold War-inspired films with a storyline about the US military launching a Doomsday bomb aimed at the Soviet Union. The tones of the respective movies are diametrically opposite however, Dr Strangelove is a farce and satire, comically lampooning the absurdity of the global nuclear standoff, whereas Fail Safe is a grimly serious dramatic thriller which plays it very straight. Dr Strangelove director Stanley Kubrick was alarmed to discover that Sidney Lumet was making a near identical movie…so concerned was Kubrick that Fail Safe with its similar content might undermine his pet project he got the production company Columbia Pictures to buy the distribution rights to Lumet’s film in order to delay its release for nine months. The wash-up from this head-start was that Dr Strangelove did far better business at the box office than the similarly themed Fail Safe and is the much better-known of the two movies today.

Images: Columbia Pictures

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🄰 there were actually three Robin Hoods in the works simultaneously at that time. The third RH intended to have Liam Neeson in the role ended up being canned prior to production starting

🄱 as one critic summed it up, “While Costner had been robbing from the rich, Rickman had been stealing the movie“, ‘Behind-the-scenes trouble during ”Robin Hood”’, Garth Pearce, Entertainment Weekly, 21-Jun-1991, www.ew.com

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The Nexus between the Southwest, the Confederacy, Slavery and Camels: Redux

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Inter-ethnic relations, Regional History

The Southwest, 1850

WEST BY SOUTHWEST
History books tell us how the United States in the first half of the 19th century strove to fulfil its self-defined mission of “Manifest Destiny” by spreading its territorial reach on the continent ever more westwards. Having acquired the Southwest—comprising vast stretches of mainly dry, desert land—through highly profitable adventures south of the Río Grande, Washington found itself staring at a dauntingly formidable obstacle to exploration and settlement.

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Jefferson Davis

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SHIPS OF THE DESERT” FOR THE SOUTHWESTERN DESERT
The idea of using camels to meet the massive challenge of traversing this harsh terrain was first floated by Quartermaster captain George H Crosman in the 1830s but it was later taken up with full enthusiasm by Jefferson Davis (later to be the breakaway Confederacy’s president during the Civil War) who advocated tirelessly for the superior efficacy of camels over mules and horses as “beasts of burden” ideally suited to the Southwest. As well as the being the optimal pack animal for the arid New Mexico territory plains, the camel, it’s proponents claimed, would help soldiers hunt down troublesome native peoples impeding westward progress (‘The sinister reason why camels were brought to the American West’, Kevin Waite, National Geographic, 27-Oct-2021, www.nationalgeographic.com). Davis, after being appointed secretary of war in the Pierce Administration, eventually got approval to purchase a caravan of 40 camels through Congress in 1855 and the US Army Camel Corps came into existence.

Pack-carrying dromedaries in the desert (Photo: Getty Images/Stockphoto)

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The plan to import camels itself was not Davis’ idea but the brainchild of Major Henry C Wayne , also an early convert to the camel cause. Wayne was selected to collect the army’s first batch of camels from West Africa, however his public role in the camel saga soon became secondary to the private capacity he fashioned for himself as the number one publicist in promoting the virtues and utility of camels for America…proclaiming a multiplicity of uses in addition to transportation, including plantation chores (eg, hauling cotton, corn, etc.) which were more cost-effective than comparable equine alternatives. Wayne’s efforts ignited a craze for camels and dromedaries especially among Southern planters (‘The Dark Underbelly of Jefferson Davis’ Camels’, Michael E. Woods, Muster, 21-Nov-2017, www.thejournalofthecivilwarerw.org).

‘Southwest Passage’, a 1950s Hollywood B-movie purportedly about the Camel Corps

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CONSPIRACY AND OPPORTUNISM
With camels, if not quite thick on the ground very much conspicuously present, the Camel Corps HQ was established at Camp Verde, Texas, and army camel experiments were undertaken in the Southwest. What eventually emerged though were other, non-military uses for the importation of camels. Behind the enthusiasm of slaveholders to acquire camels lay a deeper scheme. Jefferson Davis and the slaveholders were determined to expand slavery westward into the new territories of the Southwest even to “free” states like California, and they certainly saw the camel, capable of going without water for long periods while still hauling great loads, as instrumental to the conquest of the southwestern deserts and the securing of a safe route to the far west. Though Davis himself denied this was his intention historian Kevin Waite asserts that “camels were part of his broader fantasies for the western expansion” of the slave industry. Michael Woods offers a different viewpoint, arguing that Davis did not envision this outcome when he initiated the camel project nor did he collude with the “Slave Power” which steered the scheme, but his crucial championing of the project did trigger the chain of events that led to it.

Transatlantic Slave route to Texas

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MASKING THE BANNED SLAVE TRADE
The importation of these humped, cloven-footed creatures by Southerners likely served another, even more nefarious purpose of the slaveholding class. Suspicions were high in anti-slavery circles that the influx of camels in the 1850s was being used as a smokescreen to shield the smuggling in of African slaves—an activity made illegal in the US since the 1808 ban—probably funnelled into the country via the Texas coastline where a raft of slave traders were based (Woods).

Camel expedition in the Southwest, 1857 (Image: via VMI/Getty)

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With the outbreak of war between North and South in 1861 plans for their extensive use were pretty much shelved notwithstanding that the Confederacy now had sole control of the camels. Post-bellum, interest was not revived for a number of reasons – the camels didn’t catch on partially due to the creatures’ undesirable personal traits and their being not easy for Americans to handle. Besides, the completion of the Transcontinental Railway in 1869 made their utility for long distance transport more or less obsolete. Consequently, owners were quick to dispose of their stocks of camels, some were sold off to travelling circuses or zoos, others were simply released to roam into the wild leading to random sightings of the creatures decades afterwards.