-
04: People’s Daily editorial on June 3 and the general strikes
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 People’s Daily editorial on June 3 and the general strikes The British and Hong Kong governments recognized that Hong Kong would be indefensible if Beijing was determined to take over the colony forcibly. But based on the judgment that Beijing was not the mastermind behind the disturbances in Hong Kong and had no intention of taking back the colony by force, British authorities declined to accede to the demands put forward by the left wing and handled the disturbances with a tough hand. In a telegram to the Commonwealth Office on May 24, David Trench said, “it does not look as though Peking intends at present to force us out of Hong Kong. Our assessment is rather that the local communists felt they must act here increasingly in accordance with principles of the Cultural Revolution and accordingly seized the incident at the Artificial Flower Works as a suitable opportunity for doing so. This seems to have been a mistaken initiative by the local communists, representing their response to their understanding of current trends of thought in China, rather than a policy deliberately directed from authoritative mainland sources,” he wrote. “But once the local communists had committed themselves, Peking, on the basis of misleading reports of [the] local situation, felt not only that they must react in support, but also that they could exploit the situation in order at least to humiliate us to such an extent as to ensure that in future we would be much more quickly sensitive to Peking pressure, and if possible to force us to accept a Macau-type situation.”1 The governor’s views were echoed by Donald Hopson, British chargé d’affaires in Beijing. In a telegram to the Foreign Office on June 2, Hopson said, “from what has happened so far it seems probable that the CPG [the Chinese government] did not deliberately start the trouble. The left wing in Hong Kong may have gone further than the CPG wanted in blowing up the situation. The CPG was thereby forced to intervene politically in support of the left wing.”2 The Asia Communist Affairs section of the US State Department agreed that “the Chinese government were unlikely to want to alter the status of Hong Kong at the present juncture, in view of the Sino-Soviet dispute, the situation in Vietnam and their own internal difficulties. They must also realize by now that Hong Kong Cheung_04_ch04.indd 57 19/04/2011 3:54 PM 58 Hong Kong’s Watershed could not be softened up as easily as Macau . . . The Chinese government would probably like to maintain more or less the status quo in Hong Kong, with a certain amount of agitation to satisfy local enthusiasts.”3 On June 2, the People’s Daily published a commentary entitled “Salute to the brave compatriots in Hong Kong” which described the “Hong Kong compatriots” as “invincible”. “Although the British imperialists have army, police, agents, guns and emergency regulations in their hands, they are just a paper tiger and will be smashed by the great storm of revolution by the Hong Kong compatriots. The doomsday of British imperialism in Hong Kong is drawing closer as British persecution of our compatriots becomes more frantic. With the backing of 700 million of Chinese people, the Hong Kong compatriots must seek the repayment of the bloody debts from British imperialism and sentenced it to death penalty. This historic day is bound to come,” the commentary said. A spokesman for the Struggle Committee said on June 3 that the Hong Kong British authorities had been “besieged by the storm of anti-persecution struggle started by the Hong Kong compatriots”. He said that the struggle would continue regardless of the emergency regulations. Claiming that a larger scale of antipersecution struggle was about to happen, the spokesman called on the Hong Kong people to “take action right away and prepare for the fight”. The editorial of the People’s Daily published on June 3 lifted Beijing’s propaganda warfare against the British authorities in Hong Kong to a new height. The editorial, which was printed on the front page under the headline “Firmly rebuff provocation by British imperialism”, said that the Hong Kong compatriots would certainly firmly struggle, “oppose a stubborn enemy, pursue a tottering foe, bring down British imperialism and make it stink”. “British imperialism is the vicious colonizer of Hong Kong. It is the enemy of 4 million Chinese compatriots and of 700 million Chinese people. For the last...