World: Flood of Misery

Like men racing toward the Promised Land, refugees from Red China continued to pour into Hong Kong. By the thousands they burrowed under the new British-built barbed-wire fence on the border, or daringly swam across arms of the South China Sea, buoyed up by inflated bladders.

Once in the crown colony, they dodged through fields and thickets, trying to avoid being spotted by R.A.F. helicopters cruising low over Robins Nest Mountain and the scrub pines of Flower Hill. Most were routed from their hiding places by skirmish lines of British troops, and sent to Fanling camp. There, after a nourishing meal, the luckless refugees were herded onto trains or trucks for the short ride back to Red China. Along the way, fellow Chinese tossed food packages into the refugees' outstretched hands. Most of them saved some of the food against the day when they would try again to get into Hong Kong.

Over the past month, British guards have turned back some 60,000 refugees,* but an estimated 10,000 others slipped through the cordon—in overwhelming, living testimony against the Communist regime that rules their homeland.

Dazzling Food. Once they reach Kowloon or Victoria, they are relatively safe, for the Chinese of Hong Kong are close and clannish and, in a crisis, do not desert their own. The refugees disappear into the life of the Hong Kong poor—grim by Western standards but, measured against Red China, a bit of paradise.

What dazzles the refugees is the abundance of food. Every crowded Hong Kong street is redolent of salt dried fish and the sharp smell of pickles. Vendors offer oranges, bananas and cakes; the stalls of Market Row gleam with eggplant, squash and tomatoes. Workers throng the pork shops to buy succulent halves of crisp, glazed pig. Store fronts are filled with families clustered around rice bowls and side dishes of meat and fish.

In Hong Kong, even if a man sleeps on the street—and 15,000 do each night— there is work enough to buy at least some food. The unskilled refugees find jobs paying $1 a day as ditchdiggers, coolies, factory sweepers, stevedores. Children perch on street corners putting together plastic flowers for the U.S. market. Young mothers, with babies strapped to their backs, haul water up the mountainside.

A sixth of Hong Kong's 3,250,000 people occupy squatter towns like Diamond Hill, made up of cardboard-walled cubicles and straw-mat lean-tos. More than 80,000 others find homes in tar-paper shacks on tenement rooftops. Some 362,000 refugees have already been housed in the colony's impressive resettlement projects, and construction over the next five years will care for 100,000 more annually. Even the unemployed Chinese refugees in Hong Kong need not starve: there are 86 private and public social service agencies, and the U.S.

Government since 1954 has contributed $28 million worth of surplus food.

Sinking Island. For a while, if the flood of escapees continued, it almost seemed as if overcrowded Hong Kong would burst and sink. The West sensed a powerful duty to relieve Hong Kong and help shelter these patient, dogged refugees from Red misery—and yet there was little enough the West was ready to do. U.S.