Trains and boats and planes

Murray Sayle

Hong Kong Last week Britain's stubbornly surviving Asian colony was officially declared a cholera zone, starting the customary run on inoculation centres at airports around the world. Cholera is a rare occurrence these days, and in this case a puzzling one: the dangerous and humiliating disease can only be spread from someone who already has it via an unprotected water supply. Hong Kong has been more or less free of it for years, and among the colony's many ambiguous advantages is the unequivocal benefit of the purest water in the Far East.

The scare was shortlived. The lone sufferer was soon identified as a six-year-old Chinese boy, Yueng Kamsze, living with his family in the small, semi-industrialised village of Tuen Mun not far from the Chinese border. The lad was found to be carrying the milder el tor strain of cholera which is endemic in various parts of India and China, was rushed off to the local Princess Margaret Hospital, and is making a satisfactory recovery in the isolation ward.

Yet the incident has caused some alarm, in another way. The mini-outbreak, it is clear, originated in China. The Yueng family, it emerged, have only been in Hong Kong for six weeks. In that time they managed to acquire Hong Kong identity cards, the grown-ups had found jobs in a local factory, they had temporarily solved Hong Kong's biggest headache, living space, by renting a one-room apartment in the village. The Yuengs are now full-fledged Hong Kong 'belongers' with as much right to be here as anyone else, and a modest start made on Hong Kong's full-time, allencompassing obsession, making money.

Hong Kong already has 5 million people (some say nearer 6) with the great mass jammed into the 1 2 square miles of Hong Kong Island itself and nearby Kowloon on the mainland. In the past 18 months another 220,000, by Government estimate, have flooded in from China, some legally, some illegally (whose laws are we breaking today?), despite a triple tier of wire fences patrolled with dogs and helicopters by a brigade of Gurk has reputed to be able to see in the dark, a batal lion of the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, the local amateur soldiers of the Royal Hong Kong Volunteers, the militarised border police, an entire Chinese infantry division supposedly co-operating on the other side, the well-fed sharks of Mirs Bay on one end of the border and a treacherous mud swamp on the other, and the imminent arrival of a flotilla of Navy patrol boats and 42 Royal Marine Commando from Britain to help plug some more leaks in the sieve.

Sieve it is, basically, because no one's heart is really in it. Chinese family relations are close, especially so in South China, and the 140 years of Hong Kong's existence have done little or nothing to disintegrate the immense septs and clans of Wongs, Hos, Ngs and Yuengs who have populated the Pearl River valley and its estuary since time immemorial.

The new proto-capitalist policies of the Chinese government now make family reunions relatively easy. Hong Kong-born Chinese are now considered to be 'national compatriots' by the authorities in Canton , and Peking, and they can visit 'mainland China', as it is still quaintly called here, pretty much as they please. Last year more than 1.7 million did so, half of them carrying TV sets as gifts for their relatives, and the rest loaded down with radios, hi-fl equipment, sporting gear, sewing machines (a greatly valued gift, because the recipient can earn money making clothes), watches, electric fans and even, it is said, motor bikes and cars.

No wonder, as Uncle and Auntie describe life under compradore capitalism while handing out the prezzies to their openmouthed kin on the collective farms of Kwangtung Province, that the lights of Hong Kong glow on the horizon like the beacons of a forbidden paradise.

Nor is entry as difficult as the authorities try to make out. Hong Kong belongers can apply to have their relatives legally join them from China; the office concerned suspended operations last May when 100,000 sets of application forms had been issued, and they are now supposedly being 'reviewed'. The Chinese authorities, as understanding of family problems as any other Chinese, issue thousands of exit permits from China which Hong Kong has no choice but to honour. Even without a per mit, 'illegal immigration' from China to Hong Kong is more of a rugged outdoor sport than the perilous dash past Vopos, minefields and machine-guns which people trying to leave Communist countries in Europe have to chance.

Although they carry weapons, the soldiers on either side of the Hong Kong border seldom, if ever, use them. There are floodlights, but no minefields, no machinegun nests. Relations between Hong Kong and China are currently excellent, and no one wants to risk them with a careless massacre. The worst an illegal faces (except for those swimming Mirs Bay, increasingly less popular) is a dog-bite or at most, a roughing-up, reportedly more severe on the Chinese side where the soldiers are said to use the rifle-butt on their countrymen.

Apprehended, the illegal immigrant faces nothing more than being sent back, where his local commune will deal with him. The penalty is currently a fine in the £200 range and anything from a week to three months' hard labour, which sets the emigrant up for his next attempt. People who have tried six tunes are not uncommon. One last week, caught on his fifth try, demanded the tea and biscuits the Gurkhas had fed him the try before to refresh him for the journey home.

Even so, an illegal has to be caught in the border zone; if he (and, less frequently, she) can get to a bus stop and travel into Hong Kong or Kowloon, like Uncle Tom crossing the Canadian border he sheds his illegal stigmata and can, following the Yuengs, at once get an identity card and start looking for a bed and a job. Nine times out of ten, Auntie and Uncle are waiting for him. Sometimes, they have already applied for his Hong Kong identity card. The rationale for issuing cards on request, a Government man told me, is that Hong Kong's advanced printing industry would only forge them anyway, and the purpose of the cards is not population control but simply to establish who's who.

Crawling under the wire is, these days, only for the young, poor and fit. Other favoured methods are to arrive by train from Canton, either legally, 'riding the rods', or hidden in an empty container or a piece of Chinese furniture. Some attempt the seaside swamps in six-foot home-made `mudboots', which you might have imagined Confucius wearing if he had taken up waterskiing.

Families tend to arrive by 'snakeboat', a picturesque Hong Kong term which describes not so much the design of the specially fitted-up fishing junks which ply the trade, but the devious courses they steer to avoid the patrol craft which look for them every moonless night. Again, the game is hide and seek, and the booms, nets, river mines and guns which could really compel the snakeboat skippers to earn their fees are simply not deployed, for fear of a nasty incident. A passage by snakeboat, either from a point of departure somewhere up the Pearl River or from Macao 40 miles away on the shore opposite Hong Kong, is currently in the region of £250 a head. Illegals from China are only part of Hong Kong's population boom. The colony is now sheltering 67,000 plus 'boat people' from Vietnam, the biggest group anywhere, having persuaded, so far, other countries to take in less than 8,000. Most, but not all of the boat people reaching Hong Kong are Chinese, and they are following an all Chinese route now as well signposted as Uncle Tom's underground railroad. The boats reaching Hong Kong come mainly from North Vietnam. Some of them are well-found motorised fishing boats, others are pathetically tiny, 18 or 20 foot long open skiffs with bamboos lashed to the gunwales for extra bouyancy and tattered old tarpaulins for improvised decking. Those arriving in the past week or two seem to have made their escape more through the inefficiency or indifference of the Vietnamese coastguard than as a result of some sordid body-trading by the Vietnamese authorities.

They cling closely to the coast of China as soon as they are clear of Vietnamese waters, Putting in frequently to avoid bad weather or to restock with fuel and victuals. Chinese in the tiny ports on the way give them crudely duplicated charts and directions of the course to steer for Hong Kong.

As they pass Macao, a friendly Macauense patrol boat checks that they have no intention of putting into the Portuguese colony, already sheltering 40,000 boat people, illegals from China and other leaves blown by history's storm, and that the refugees are on the true bearing for Hong Kong, H.M. Customs meet them off the tip of Lantao Island, safe in Hong Kong Waters, whence they are towed or escorted to the Governement Dockyard in Kowloon, now settled down to a regular routine as a refugee reception centre. At the dockyard, a set of grim old godowns which were about to be demolished, the refugees get a delousing. Medical attention if they ask for it, clothes from voluntary relief organisations, an instant photography session and the ubiquitous Hong Kong identity card, a mat to sleep on and two meals a day supplied by the Hong Kong Government. The food is rice, meat and noodles, adequate in quantity and, to my taste anyway, passably palatable. Within ten days the boat people are moved to one of the 25 camps scattered around Hong Kong. and their boats are unceremoniously burnt. The camp at Sham Shui Po, on the Kowloon peninsula, is among the more comfortable. It consists of a set of old army huts around a square and the Jubilee Mansions, ancient British Army married quarters, next door. The director is Jimmy Reed, .a retired Scottish businessman (Hong Kong is ac'w, and always has been a Sino-Scottish condominium) who brings to the job the in experience of having been interned ;IL the same camp by the Japanese during 111.e, Second World War. `Nae comparison WI the conditions here noo,' he told me. Just the same, Jubilee Mansions are fear"wily Overcrowded with 9,800 people in residence. The refugees sleep in three t to bunks, three adults to a bunk or nine I(3 a tier, many hung about by the womenfolk , .vvith hand-me-down sheets and blankIn a sad attempt to create privacy. The morale of the camp, however, ttPears high, for two reasons. The first is at 70 per cent of the residents, everyone, „n,,faet, except children and mothers looking camp Lem, have found jobs outside the CrriP., mostly in the tiny workshops and beyond factories in the teeming suburbs month the gates. They are earning £75.a Tionth and up; the current going rate in, ;rag Kong for a 'skilled unskilled worker someone like an ex-illegal who has learnt on the job) is around 1200 Hong ^Tlg dollars, or near enough £100 a month. Kumours have floated in Hong Kong that ern t Ployers have sacked belongers in order 0 hire refugees at lower rates, and there have been a couple of punch ups between refugees and local Chinese residents, one last week and one in February. In both cases drink was involved, and the significant point here is probably the fact that the newcomers had enough money for beer and Chinese wine, rather than the rowdy behaviour which followed. Refugees with jobs are expected to buy their own food, forefeiting the 50p a day they are allowed after arrival, and some have started to move out of the camp, still keeping their refugee status and the hope of getting to California. The cheapest Hong Kong accommodation, a wired-in cubicle in a dormitory, goes for £5 a month, and is even so an order of magnitude more comfortable than the camps.

The other morale-builder in the camps is the visible fact that people are actually leaving, and some are even getting choosey about their destinations, like the 50 who refused to go to Ireland ('it's a darlin', wee country,' said an Irish lady, mortally offended, on the Hong Kong radio). Departers, as they leave for the airport after a few months' work, look more and more like Americans leaving Saigon; new suitcases, modest hi-fi sets under their arms, the girls with high heels and make-up. There are signs, in fact, that the two human rivers pouring into Hong Kong are beginning to fuse; a refugee boat last week brought, as well as Vietnamese, four Chinese who boarded at a refuelling stop.

Refugees who manage to leave Hong Kong, either for a chop suey bar in Connemara-or the legendary liquor store across the road from Ky's in Newark, New Jersey, cross paths briefly at the airport with yet another stream of immigrants to the city of opportunity. Lured by the fabled riches of far-off Cathay, once again said to be opening up (not much yet in the till, however) there is not a bank in the world that would not like to have a branch in Hong Kong. Banks lend money: lavish credit has fuelled the Hong Kong economy. This year alone, 29 new banks have opened for business. Bankers have to live somewhere that inspires confidence; because the government was niggardly about releasing building land after the oil shock of 1974, luxury accommodation in Hong Kong is tight.

The result is that a house or large apartment on the Peak suitable for a Hong Kong banker now rents for £2,500 a month, probably the steepest residential rent in the world. For that you get seven rooms, three bathrooms, a couple of maid's rooms, a garden, a swimming pool —and a view, from a god-like altitude, of the refugee camps huddled around the dockyard on the other side of Hong Kong harbour, They can see you too, The mutual motivational effect is ,strong. In fact, if Karl Marx was still with us he might well be curious about the determination which many of these people are showing to get into the hell of capitalist exploitation which Hong Kong undoubtedly once was, and still is in many aspects. The bankers of course, flock like condors to the economic heights wherever they are allowed to perch, and the motive of the Vietnamese fleeing from the final solution of Vietnam's Chinese and bourgeois problems is easy to understand. But what induces the sturdy farmers of Kwangtung to tear up their collective roots, crawl riskily under the wire, or take a snakeboat ride to wage slavery?

Not hunger, not fear, not material deprivation in the mundane sense of the world, especially now that the colour TV sets are getting through to them. Rising expectations stoked by the visits of their relatives may be one way to look at it (the Americans undoubtedly performed this service, or disservice for many Vietnamese) but perhaps boredom with the modest predictability of what they have is a better explanation.

Hong Kong not only has Stanley Ho, Henry Fok, Gordon Wu and many another big winner to emulate. These men, the celebrated Chinese millionaires of Hong Kong, made their money either out of gambling tout court (Ho is the boss of the Macao casino syndicate, for instance) or by business deals in surplus stocks and commodities close enough to roulette in practice. The Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club runs betting shops in every part of the city 'for compatriots who want to get their start the same way. As well, Hong Kong now has Chinese middle class nearly a million strong (there are 700,000 credit cards outstanding, for instance) whose ambitions are very similar to those of other emerging Asian bourgeoisies, like those of Japan and Korea — on the one hand, they scrimp and save to get their children into high school and university; on the other, they spend heavily on Western-style conspicuous consumption, Sam Snead golf clubs, Gucci briefcases (a big new agency flourishing in Hong Kong) Black and White whisky and Rolex watches.

At the recent Sino-Caledonian summit in Peking between Sir Murray Maclehose, Hong Kong's outstandingly able Governor, and Teng Xiaoping, a man of many resources himself, the two potentates agreed that the main cause of the, mass migration was the difference in living standards between Hong Kong and Kwangtung Province with its 40 million envious residents outside, Sir Murray took this to mean that a rise in Kwangtung standards was contemplated, but a fall in Hong Kong's might well have the same effect, especially as the colony is about to become an oil town (Exxon are drilling between Hong Kong and Macao now, and the others will start before the year is out.) Oil towns notoriously provide wealth fat the few, a staggering rise in the cost of necessities for the many, and a dangerous discontent all round, with a Teheran-type denouement all too probable. If the oil money or the flood of eager-beaver refugees, or both, threatens the hard-won position of the Chinese middle-class (themselves refugees a quarter-century ago) trouble is almost bound to follow. They might take up Communism, there might even be a revolution. Stranger things have happened in China.