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25
The Fugitives of
Hong Kong and Macao
A nosebleed poses no immediate threat to the human body, but if it keeps coming back it may be a symptom of something more disturbing. People's China suffers from something rather similar-something which is not very well known in the West and is unsuspected even by the majority of those who make a professional study of contemporary society.
Every month thousands of workers, intellectuals, cadres and technical men "choose freedom" by secretly crossing the border into Hong Kong.* There they find jobs paying five to ten times as much, as well as an atmosphere of freedom, the attraction of which Western intellectuals often torget, because they already enjoy it.
The figures, and the way they have increased, are a matter of concern to the Chinese authorities. At the end of the Second World War the population of Hong Kong was 600,000; by the time the People's Republic was pro- claimed in 1949, the exodus caused by the civil war had pushed it up to 1,700,000. Some of this increase, of course, was due to the natural growth of the existing population, and some to the immigration of “Overseas Chinese" from places like Indonesia, but by far the most important factor was the arrival of refugees from China.
*I shall be concerned here only with those who go to Hong Kong, since they are the ones I have had a chance to study, but one could say much the same of those who make for the Portuguese lony of Macao or the little offshore islands under the control of the Taipeh government.
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