4
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
down into small parcels and these were conveyed by traders into all parts of China. Freedom of movement for these agents, buyers, or itinerant traders was essential if Hong Kong was to fulfil and promote its economic role, and to obtain in return for its re-exports (it had no natural products and few manufactures to sell abroad) the produce of China either for its own use or to be stored, sorted and passed on to its customers overseas. Socially the connexions between Hong Kong and China are very close in normal circum- stances. There is no marked geographical feature to form a natural frontier, and people on either side of the political border come from the same stock and lead the same sort of lives. Many long residents of Hong Kong still had their family homes in the villages of Kwangtung and Kwangsi and these they visited frequently and sometimes for extended periods. Even where personal ties had been lost, these visits were enjoined by Chinese custom. Students from Hong Kong went back to the universities of China for higher education. In the reverse direction Chinese in search of an education with a Western emphasis came to Hong Kong, and Chinese generally used the Colony as their point of contact with the whole of the Western world. There was a further reason. It was the period of China's spasmodic but long-drawn civil war in which perhaps one of the few stable factors was the accessibility and availability of Hong Kong as a refuge. For her part, Hong Kong took pride in her role as a safe and well ordered sanctuary and she welcomed all who sought asylum, on the sole condition that they did not continue whatever struggle they were engaged in from within her borders. In 1932 the Japanese attack on China began. By 1937 Canton had been captured, and as the Japanese Army advanced to the British border several hun- dreds of thousands of refugees fled before it, crossed the border and tacitly claimed asylum. The influx continued. A time came when there was no longer any possibility of absorbing such large numbers into the organized life of the