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EUGENE COOPER
also keeps them closely informed of events on the Mainland. Membership in an affiliated union may also facilitate return trips to one's native village in China during New Years and at other times as well, since the Federation provides a link up with Chinese representatives and bureaucracy in Hong Kong.
The contradiction between the interest of the Hong Kong worker in his own material well being, and the requirement that he subordinate his immediate interests to the long run national interests of Peking, has surely not made life easy for the constituent unions of the pro-communist Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions in their organizing efforts in the post-war Hong Kong setting.
Nevertheless, in more recent years, as Peking pursued the resolution of what it took to be "principle contradictions", namely admission to the U.N. and the liberation of Taiwan, developments in Hong Kong tended to bear out the appropriateness of their strategy. In 1971, when the Peking government displaced the Taiwan government as the sole legitimate representative of the Chinese people at the United Nations, the political influence that Peking was able to exercise in the political balance of Hong Kong grew enormously at the expense of the Nationalists. Organs of Peking power like the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions gained an enormous legitimacy in the new aura that came to surround the Peking government. Allegiance to the People's Republic, long an obstacle to effective organizing among Hong Kong's largely political-refugee population, became somewhat more of an asset for groups like the Woodwork Carvers' Union. 1971 marked a turning point in the fortunes of their organizing. Indeed one could argue that the relegation of the "Hong Kong problem" to the status of a secondary contradiction made a great deal of sense, as the political balance tipped noticeably in favor of the Peking government after 1971 with the resolution of a higher order contradiction, i.e. the seating of the Peking government at the U.N.
These developments have helped the Woodwork Carvers' Union immeasurably in its attempt to organize an increasingly proletarianized work force according to principles consistent with Maoist ideology, although the apparent contradiction between genuinely class oriented, as opposed to nation oriented, loyalties and its peculiar configuration in Hong Kong remains.