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Chinese leaders seemed determined to use this occasion to make their presence felt, though they had already been told in no uncertain terms that the Government did not want this impression to be given.
Before the strike ended, cargo boatmen and others had been anxious about those rioters who had been arrested and detained. They had not been sentenced on the 3rd because of insufficient evidence against them. They were tried on the 10th. On that day, the court was packed, and significantly, among the crowd was a "certain past director of the Tung Wah Hospital."76 Significant also was Ho Kai's appearance as defence attorney. Some of the men he defended were reported to be unaware of the fact that they were being represented by a barrister." Who instructed Ho Kai? One possibility is that Chinese leaders had hired him to defend rioters as part of the deal to induce boatmen and coolies to resume work. Another possibility is that Ho had done so on his own, out of a mixture of the patriotic fervour which he was to demonstrate so freely in his later reformist writings, and self-interest in establishing himself as a Chinese leader. Whatever the case, we see attempts by Chinese to defend Chinese, and reverse what many believed to be patent injustice. And again, we see the possible combination of high principles and material interests within the Chinese leadership.
The fines were, therefore, repaid and work was resumed. For all practical purposes, the riot was over by the afternoon of the 3rd and the general strike was terminated by the 5th. In quantitative terms, the general strike lasted only five days and the riot a matter of hours. A month and a half later, Governor Bowen summed up the events by saying, "It is now generally acknowledged on all sides that the riot of October 3rd had little, if any, permanent or political significance.”78 His attitude seems to be shared by historians of Hong Kong, including G. B. Endacott and Lin Yu-lan79 who have not devoted special attention to it in their works.
Ironically, the few historians who have focussed upon these events have done so beyond the context of Hong Kong history. Fang Han-ch'i wrote of them in 1957 in terms of an