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were said to be attached to the Strikers Headquarters
in Canton. Explosives were reported to have been sent
to Hong Kong and bomb cases were to be sent down in
sections. An exhaustive search of boarding-houses
was immediately made by the Police, but without result.
On March 22nd the Labour Maintenance Bureau reported the arrival of a certain "assassin" at certain premises
in Hong Kong. A search was made but nothing was found to corroborrate the information. Police are maintaining
a careful watch for any sign of the intended execution
of the plot.
2. The Chinese members of Council are inclined
to treat this report with considerable respect. Recent political assassinations in Shanghai where according to a confession by a criminal recorded in the Press today (copy attached) the price of an assassination is twenty
dollars, and the attacks on the British, American and
Japanese Consuls at Nanking are indications of how far
fanaticism will go in China at the present time. There have moreover (as you will see from my secret despatch of the 29th March) been reports of a plot against the lives of the Governor General and Attorney General of Netherland India, brought to my notice by the Netherland Consul General, in which Chinese resident in Hong Kong
are in some way implicated and in which the Consul General's informant has mysteriously disappeared and is supposed to have been kidnapped and taken to Canton.
3. I do not myself think it likely that political assassination will be attempted in Hong Kong unless the Labour agitators from Canton succeed in their efforts to start a strike here. In that case organized assas-
sination might be attempted as a sure means of scaring
the
=
(1)