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it were triggered initially by a lockout at a plastic flowers factory in Kowloon and fanned by some arbitrary police action taken against demonstrating workers and students. Anti-colonial demonstrations occurred and anti-British sentiment ran high, fueled by stepped up anti-imperialist propaganda radiating from the mainland then in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While most carved wood furniture factory and shop proprietors were unlikely targets for anti-imperialist attack, the Woodwork Carvers' Union seems to have taken advantage of the widespread unrest to extract a wage increase from the Merchants' Association at the time.
One school of thought (with its locus in the Far Eastern Economic Review) maintains that the Peking government was dissatisfied with its compatriots' handling of the 1967 disturbances and called a halt thereafter to revolutionary activity in the Crown Colony. While these claims are difficult to substantiate with any certainty, it is widely admitted in the Hong Kong pro-communist community that Peking was desirous of a stable situation in post-1967 Hong Kong so that it could actively pursue, from its viewpoint, more pressing diplomatic questions like its entry into the United Nations and the liberation of Taiwan.
"Hong Kong is a historical problem that will be solved at the appropriate time" goes the refrain. The Hong Kong "problem" does not have the status of a "principle contradiction" for the People's Republic. Hong Kong continues to remain valuable to the Communist government in terms of the significant amounts of foreign exchange which China earns by marketing its products in and through the port, and also as a place in which trade and diplomatic contacts are still pursued. While such functions may decline as China continues to open up diplomatically and economically, they are still a factor in Hong Kong's historical viability as a colony.
In any event, in the post-1967 period, industrial peace in Hong Kong was the common desire of the British colonial government and the communist government in Peking. This led to the assumption on the part of the communist Federation of Trade Unions of some rather odd poses in the local adaptation of Mao Tse-tung thought to the Hong Kong scene.
This was particularly so in so far as the implementation of Mao's thought has entailed a disciplined adherence to a policy of delayed