0003230
G.F. 323
CONFIDENTIAL
- 4
reaction from Peking. In July the Reuters correspondent in Peking had been put under house arrest in retaliation for the arrest of an N.C.N.A. reporter. In August a strong protest was made to London demanding the release of all N.C.N.A. employees arrested, and the withdrawal of action against the newspapers and their editors within forty-eight hours. The protest was rejected and the C.P.G. retaliated, not against Hong Kong, but by setting a mob on the Office of the British Charge d' Affaires in Peking.
17. Since the middle of July, with the continuing police raids on centres of subversion, the cause of confrontation steadily deteriorated. With the growing realisation that they must stand on their own feet, the communists began to talk increasingly of 'a long hard struggle'. In August they threatened a wave of terrorism by publishing lists of prominent persons in the Colony who were marked for assassination. There had in fact been only one victim, a prominent Chinese commentator on the Commercial wireless programme who specialised in ridiculing the communist cause. But the manner of his death was particularly vicious: he and his cousin were stopped while driving to work, drenched in petrol and burned to death an action which aroused much public indignation and contempt.
18.
From assassination they turned to bombs, sometimes specifically directed against the Police and other targets but more usually placed at random in busy thoroughfares. These 'bombs' varied in degree. Most of them were harmless imitations; many of the explosive ones contained only gunpowser extracted from fireworks and consequently were more noisy than dangerous; some were deadly. There was no way of distinguishing one from another and the same precautions, with consequent frustrating disruptions of traffic in the vicinity, had to be applied to all. They came to be accepted as an additional hazard of life and they had little effect on this bustling and energetic community; indeed, people who would have been horrified at the thought of bombs six months ago, now calmly drove round them. But the casualties that they caused, which included children and other innocent passers-by, reduced still further the support for the perpetrators, and popular demands were made for more severe punishment to be inflicted on those responsible.
19. The phase of bomb attacks came to a climax in October and November, when the disposal teams were quite seriously stretched, and to an end in December the last explosive bomb being found on Christmas Day. Since the campaign began the Police and Armed Services bomb disposal teams dealt with 8,074 suspected bombs of which 1,167 were genuine. There were 253 uncontrolled bomb explosions which caused the death of 15 people of whom two were policemen and one an army sergeant. Four men died through the explosion of bombs that they themselves were carrying. The total casualties from confrontation at this date were 51 dead, of whom 10 were policemen, and 832 injured, of whom 212 were also policemen.
Their
20. A later disquieting feature was the increasing employment of children in confrontation activities including holding noisy demonstrations, distribution inflammatory literature, and carrying and planting bombs. truculent attitudes gave an impression of strength far beyond their actual number, which is about 18,000 pupils or some 2% of the total school population. Communist schools have been used as centres for communist activities and Police raids on them have unearthed stocks of inflammatory literature as well as bombs, both simulated and real. On 27th November a youth was seriously injured by an explosion at one of these schools while trying to manufacture explosive material for bombs, and the school was closed. This action led to a protest by the C.P.G., which affected to believe that the closure amounted to persecution of those who wished to study Mao's Thoughts an activity which has in fact throughout remained legal and permissable. communist schools present a difficult and sensitive problem but there are indications that this incident had some effect in restraining their excesses.
15...
The
CONFIDENTIAL