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profoundest contempt.
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7.
In paragraph 7 of his report Mr. Fletcher
observes, quite correctly, that the Chinese Police and the
District Watchmen Force were entirely useless in regard to
getting information as to cases of intimidation.
I am not sure that I entirely agree with his
comment "though they must have had the amplest evidence
available". The difficulty of dealing with the intimidation
was that nobody would give information as to the person who
had threatened him, and I think that a Chinese of the lower
classes could hardly be expected to give information to the
police with the prospect of being called on to give evidence
in court. It is clear that the information departments of
the Police Force and the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs will
have to be drastically reorganised but at present I am inclined to blame them less than those Chinese of the upper
classes who had ample opportunities of ascertaining the
facts from their servants and could have passed on the
infomation confidentially to the Government.
A short reference to the methods of the
intimidators may be of interest as illustrating the amazing
cowardice of the Chinese lower classes. A gang of coolies
would be passed by a man who would use some such phrase as
*This is not allowed" or "If you work, something will
happen", and would at once cease work in abject terror.
Domestic servants almost without exception declared,
frequently with tears, that they did not want to quit work but that they would be killed or their families would be
killed if they did not.
Endeavours to ascertain who was proposing
to kill them were uniformly unsuccessful. "Somebody in the
street had told them so", "Everybody knew it", and so forth. A common method was for somebody to ring up the head 'boy'
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