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Report No....HK..113.....
Continuation No..........3..
Mr. Davies: Well in many senses, yes. They've got everything to pat themselves on the back about. After all we've had a very a very tough year indeed and we've come through with all flags flying. Look at the harbour, look at everything around you. Building's starting again. The money that left the banking system is starting to come back. Exports during '67 went up by 12% and we export about 90% of what we make. I think there's every reason to be self- satisfied, but self-satisfaction and complacency is, in fact, our greatest danger today rather than the communists. We should be very grateful to the communists for making such an utter 'cock-up' of their campaign. They made every possible mistake they could, including disobeying Chairman Mao's instructions to go amongst the population like fishes in water and win mass support.
Instead they shut themselves away in their barricaded Union headquarters and threw bombs and tried to harm the economy and put everyone against them. It's almost impossible that a communist movement should have managed to get 90, or 95% of a Colonialist population behind the Imperialist Government, but that's in fact, what the communists have done. Sir David Trench, Governor of Hong Kong: Certainly, there does appear to have been a change in tactics. The violence in the last ten days or so seems largely
seems largely to have gone out of the situation. I'm judging now by their own press when I say that, apparently, their tactics now is to consolidate their supporters to persuade them to study the works of Chairman Mao and generally to reaffirm themselves in their faith. This in itself is an unexceptionable method of procedure and may I stress that it's no crime to be a communist in Hong Kong, it's only a crime to disobey the law. What their tactics from there on will be, nobody really knows. After all, the only way we have of judging