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)

༓༓༓

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)

༓༓༓

“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)

༓༓༓

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)

༓༓༓

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

༓༓༓

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)

༓༓༓

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)

༓༓༓

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.

༓༓༓

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).

↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼

(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

༺༻ ༺༻ ༺༻

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.

Strangelove and his Cold Warrior Comrades, Art Imitating Life

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Comparative politics, Futurism, International Relations, New Technology,, Popular Culture, World history,

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark satire Dr Strangelove is a classic of the genre which comically probes the collective anxieties triggered in the West by the Cold War at its height in the early 1960s. Kubrick hammers home the utter absurdity of the prevailing nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union and the consequential existential threat to the planet from the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and “Doomsday bombs”. The movie’s plot involves the unilateral unleashing of a preemptive strike on Moscow by a deranged US Air Force general and the Pentagon’s shoddy attempts at “management” of the crisis.

Sellers as Dr Strangelove

˚
Kubrick and his film co-writers Terry Southern and Peter George give us three dangerously over-the-top, lunatic fringe characters – two gung-ho hawkish military types, generals Turgidson and Ripper, and the eponymous “Dr Strangelove”𝟙. The central figure in the nuclear nightmare scenario, Dr Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers), is a former German Nazi technocrat turned US strategic weapons expert and scientific advisor to the US president Merkin Muffley (also Sellers). Strangelove is creepily sanguine about the prospect for humanity post-nuclear Holocaust, expanding on his vision of a 100-year plan for survival (for some)…a male elite ensconced in an underground bunker where they can sire a selective breeding program with a plurality of desirable females [‘Dr Strangelove (character)’, Kubrick Wiki, www.kubrick.fandom.com].

Wernher Von Braun (Photo: Mondadori via Getty Images)

˚
Strangelove a composite of various personages
Though characterised by caricature and satire, the film’s three wildest characters are recognisable among the actual political, military and scientific figures of the day in America. The heavy Middle European accent of Dr Strangelove, his authoritarian-Nazi mannerisms and regular references to “Mein Führer”, has led some observers to conclude that the character was based on German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, instrumental in the Nazis’ V-2 rocket project and after 1945 in the US designing space rockets for NASA (a view given countenance by one of the screenwriters Terry Southern). Others have added émigré Hungarian scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller as models for Strangelove. Both men worked on the Super-bomb projects (A-Bomb, H-Bomb, C-Bomb) for the US government in the 1940s and 50s, and both were rabidly anti-communist and anti-Russian [P.D. Smith, Doomsday Men (2007)]. Teller in particular shared a number of Strangelove’s traits, eg, volatile nature, Soviet-fixated and obsessed with bombs, possessed of a prosthetic limb. It’s probably a reasonable bet that the there was something of the personality of all three men in Dr Strangelove, but other individuals were also sources of inspiration for the character.

Herman Kahn (Source: Alchetron)

˚
A Megadeath influencer from RAND
Another real-life figure widely associated with the Strangelove character is Herman Kahn, who was a physicist and military strategist with the RAND Corporation𝟚. Kubrick got the idea of a “Doomsday Machine” from Kahn whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War posited the possibility of a winnable (sic) nuclear war. Kahn has been described as a “Megadeath Intellectual” with his robust insistence that the dangers of nuclear war were exaggerated (this also accords with the outlier position of General Buck Turgidson – see below)𝟛.

Gen. Jack Ripper (Photo: Columbia Pictures)

˚
Military madness
Maverick general in the Strategic Air Command Jack D Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden) is gripped by the all-consuming communist conspiracy hysteria. His belief in the loony notion that the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans leads him to initiate a H-Bomb onslaught on the USSR without consulting the Pentagon. Ripper’s wild rhetoric and blustery style has been compared to Robert Welch, the rabid anti-communist founder of the ultra-conservative and reactionary John Birch Society. Ripper’s loopy claim about Soviet water contamination echoes Welch’s baseless anti-fluoridation allegations (‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying’).

Gen. LeMay (Image: Mort Kunstler / Stag)
˚
Expendable dead
Gen. Buck Turgidson (played by George C Scott) was largely modelled on four-star air force general Curtis LeMay𝟜. Turgidson is an unrepentant war hawk who wants to escalate Ripper’s nuclear attack on the Soviets, justifying it with the outrageous claim that it will result in only “limited” casualties from the ensuing superpower war, which in his estimate equates to 10 to 20 million dead! Like Turgidson LeMay danced to the beat of his own drum, he was well disposed towards a preemptive strike on the Russians and vociferously advocated nuclear strikes on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on North Vietnam during the Indo-China War.

Gen. Turgidson (Scott) in the War Room (Columbia Pictures)

˚
The actions and statements of the clearly psychotic Ripper and morally reprehensible Turgidson convey insights into the level of paranoia gripping the real-life military commanders in the climate of the nuclear arms buildup in the Sixties. [Fred Kaplin, “Truth Stranger than ‘Strangelove‘“, New York Times, 10-Oct-2004, nytimes.com].

Fail Safe (1964)

˚

Footnote: Satirical Dr Strangelove v Serious Fail Safe
Intriguingly, at the same time Kubrick was making Dr Strangelove there was a separate film in the works also about an American nuclear attack on the USSR. Fail Safe dealt with the same subject but as a straight-up drama. In this second film about nuclear Armageddon the trigger to the catastrophic event however is not rogue generals but a technical glitch. Strangelove’s equivalent morality-free scientist character in Fail Safe is Professor Groeteschele (played by Walter Matthau) who draws similar comparisons with Herman Kahn.


𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝟙
Dr Strangelove is broadly based on George’s novel Red Alert (1958), although the character of Dr Strangelove doesn’t appear in the novel
𝟚 mimicked in Dr Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation
𝟛 another Strangelove comparison is Henry Kissinger…suggested by a shared “eerie poise, lugubrious German accent and brutally pragmatic realpolitik” [Gary Susman, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, Time, 11-Feb-2013, www.entertainment.time.com]
𝟜 although behaviourally the Ripper character (“cigar-chomping, gruff-talking”) also resembles LeMay’s style

The Land That Banned Beer for the Greater Part of the 20th Century

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Public health,, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

❝ It is the prohibition that makes anything precious ❞
 ~ Mark Twain

࿐ྂ ࿐ྂ ࿐ྂ

Prohibition, an international movement (Source: PBS)

IN the early decades of the 20th century a number of countries passed laws to restrict the domestic consumption of alcoholic beverages, most notably the US with its interwar Prohibition injunction. Typically the ban only lasted for limited periods of time in these countries before the laws were repealed. One country that was an exception to this was Iceland which established a countrywide “dry” era that lasted, officially at least, for over seven decades. Following advocacy from the country’s temperance and pro-independence movements1⃞ a referendum was held in 1908 in which adult male Icelanders2⃞ voted 60% in favour of outlawing alcohol, to take effect from 1915.

Denmark and Iceland

No to alcohol, no to Danish interdependence
 Part of the anti-alcohol drive emanated from political motives, prohibition coincided with the struggle of Icelanders to gain its independence, by rejecting alcohol they were distancing themselves from the parent, Denmark, and the Danish lifestyle (Danes have traditionally been among the heaviest drinkers of beer) (‘Why was Beer Banned in Iceland?’, Reykjavík Tourist Info, 27-Feb-2022, www.blog.rekyjaviktouristinfo.is).

The ban on wine was lifted in 1922, partly at least due to economic imperatives and the effect on Iceland’s GDP. Pressure came from its Iberian trading partners. The loss of their Icelandic market for red and rosé wines prompted Spain and Portugal to threaten to cease importing Iceland‘s salted cod. Lifting of the ban on spirits followed in 1935. Internally, a relaxing of the law was facilitated by the medical profession as doctors began prescribing the consumption of wine as a medicinal measure for the population. The banning of bjor (beer) however remained in force (‘Why Iceland Banned Beer’, Megan Lane, BBC, 01-Mar-2015, www.bbc.com).

Skál! (Photo: Scandification)

A ban on beer but not on all “beer products”
 Like what happened elsewhere, consumers of beer were still able to access and imbibe the frothy ale from several sources. The Icelandic war on beer was targeted at full-strength beer…beer (usually of the pilsner kind) which didn’t exceed 2.25% alcohol was not deemed illegal. The watered-down variety and “beer substitutes” were available, such as brennivin (distilled “beer-like” potato vodka). Home-brew (Landi) flourished, as did smuggling of the amber substance (fishermen could get their hands on a case or two easily enough). If you were a diplomat you could get access to beer as part of your official state duties.

The Prohibitionists’ reasoning
 The 20th century rolled on and the Icelanders’ ban on beer persisted. With beer less expensive than either wine or spirits, the authorities’ worry was that if cheap beer was freely available, this would lead to a contagion of heavy drinking in the community, especially among adolescents. By the 1970s there were signs of societal attitudinal change. Duty-free liquor could be purchased at airports by airline crews and foreign travellers, by the end of the decade this dispensation was extended to returning locals.

Icelandic White Ale 5.2% ABV (Photo: Muse on Booze)

End of the beer drought
Finally by 1988 more liberal attitudes towards the alcoholic brew’s place in modern Icelandic society prevailed. Polls in the 1980s showed that 6 in 10 citizens favoured beer’s legalisation…a groundswell of rising opinion against the ban’s continuance pushed the Althingi (Icelandic parliament’s) hand3⃞. The upper chamber of the national legislature voted (fairly narrowly, 13–8) to repeal the ban on beer, effective from 1 March 1989 (which henceforth became celebrated annually in Iceland as “Beer Day”).

Traditional sour Gose beer, Icelandic style (Photo: issuu.com)

Today the beer flows in Iceland, especially at this time in late January when Thorri Seasonal Beers are made available to the public4⃞. At any time of the year city locals can freely drink the latest Euro-fashionable craft beers infused with herbs and Arctic blueberries and just about anything else imaginable in microbreweries. Regulation of beer however has not entirely vanished…outside of airports citizens can only buy beer at the government-owned Vinbúdin stores and if you are under 20 the law still bars you from purchasing any grog in the stores or airports.

Endnote: government monopolies on consumer items are a bit of a thing in Iceland. Between 1910 and 1977 the only outlet where you could buy that staple of domestic sustenance, milk, was the Mjólkurbúò, a state-owned milk store (‘Fun facts about Iceland — Strange customs, weird laws and interesting facts’, Reykjavik Excursions, 15-Aug-2022, www.re.is). Tobacco sales are also regulated by the same state monopoly company as alcohol, Vinbúdin.

Iceland: Whale testicle beer (Source: au.whales.org)

━─═━─═━─═━─═━─═━─═━─═━─═─

1⃞   at the time Iceland was in a “Personal Union” with Denmark, not securing full sovereignty and independence until 1944

2⃞   women were not permitted to vote in the poll although overwhelmingly they were in support of the liquor ban

3⃞ legislators were also persuaded by the tax revenue boost that legalisation of the popular brew would bring

4⃞  during Thorrabjór Icelanders can drink traditional beer brews flavoured with, for instance, smoked whale testicles (5.1% alcohol) – a drop decidedly NOT popular with conservationists though!

🇮🇸 🍻 🍻 🍻 🇮🇸  

Bill Nix in the Mix: Art of the Long-Defunct Harbour Shipyard

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Local history, Social History, Visual Arts

I’D never heard of Bill Nix until one day recently when I stumbled upon a selection of his paintings on display at the old Mark Foy’s building (these days reincarnated as the legal eagle-infested Downing Centre). His one-syllable name rhymes with that of another, very different artist of a different era from Europe, Otto Dix, who was one of the principal dissident artists who visually chronicled the social and political decay of post-World War I Weimar Republic German society, and the scourge of Hitler and the Nazis.

Dix’s 1920 ‘The Skat Players’


Nix’s paintings behind the glass of Liverpool Street Mark Foy’s entrance have a unmistakable gritty realism to them and are of a different ilk, style-wise, to the unglamourised, intended-to-shock, expressionistic and surrealistic paintings of Otto Dix, depicting the grotesque, the deformed and the anguished denizens of interwar Germany. The collection of Nix’s work at Mark Foy’s, also unglamourised, adhere to a single theme, the depiction of work life at the long-disappeared Cockatoo Island shipbuilding industry. Nix’s group portraits of the workers, blue collar, office workers and other employees of Cockatoo Island between 1950 and 1980, contain an intimacy borne of personal experience…the artist worked on the island in the 1960s and 70s first as a errand boy, then apprenticed as a fitter-and-machinist and lastly as a draughtsman.

The artworks on display, all done in oil and charcoal on canvas, are a part of larger collection of Nix’s paintings and drawings entitled ‘The Boys from Cockatoo’, focusing on a range of work activities relating to the shipyard including catching the ferry to work, ship repairing and labouring, union meetings, blacksmith shop, the drawing office, the canteen, etc.

‘The Boys from Cockatoo’ series had its public debut in 2008 with a 20-painting exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, which Nix later expanded on to add new works inspired by his memories of the variety of day-to-day routines undertaken by workers at Cockatoo Island.