Hong Kong Squeeze
Mao's minions in the British colony of Hong Kong have upped the ante, moving from riots to strikes to terrorism. Meanwhile, Chinese in-neigh- boring Kwantung have made mob incursions into one section of the colony and have fired across the border, killing five policemen. Britain's earlier hope that its firmness would give the Maoists pause is dimming. There is no longer the same confident expectation that Hong Kong's hard-cash value to China (some $500 million a year in for-
eign exchange) will dampen Peking's desire to squeeze the British out.
The stop-and-go character of Communist pres- sure suggests an element of calculation. So does Peking's care to attribute the border shootings to its "frontier guards," rather than to its army. But the purpose of the calculation is unvoiced- perhaps even undecided. China says it wants the British to kowtow but it has not said what it will do if they don't, or even if they do. "Whatever the Communist purpose, it is likely to be implemented by degrees of harassment, such as reducing the water supply from the mainland, rather than by outright ultimatum. This would complicate Brit- ain's already difficult decision on how to respond.
So far the British have called out the police, and now their troops, to keep order, but it is obvious they lack the financial, military and po- litical wherewithal to stay in Hong Kong on their own if the Chinese determine to oust them. That would pose the question of American support:
Certain things can be said about that now. Un- like the major American position in the Far East, which is the consequence of post World War II strategic considerations, the shrunken British po- sition is a commercial-imperial carryover from : the 19th Century. The practical difference is that the British have-at this late point-only profit and pride to lose, not power and prestige. And profit and pride are more dispensable.
Physically, Hong Kong is so vulnerable as to have little strategic value for the United States. Politically, it is vulnerable because it is unques- tionably Chinese; Britain is there by virtue of a lease pressed on a suppine China in an age past. An American decision on backing the British would have to hinge on whether London felt there were valid reasons of high strategy for a joint British-American presence in the Far East. Such a presence would have to cover not llong Kong alone but Vietnam and the region as a whole.
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