CO537-4825 — Page 17

MONG-KONG'S OPEN FRONTIER

Stream Divides Two Ways of Life

NO PASSPORTS

From PATRICK O'DONOVAN, The Scotsman" Special Correspondent HONG-KONG (by Air Mail.)-There is one of the world's strangest frontiers near here. It is not greatly threatened and it is not fought! over. It is almost quiet. But on one side is! a neat British colony and on the other a great lawless stretch of South China. This is Kwangtung Province, cut and slashed by: rivers and mountains, teeming with villages: and small towns, where the Communists have had almost complete control for two years.

Yet it is an open frontier, and without passports some 3000 Chinamen a week come padding across the Bailey bridge that to-day! sags rather hopelessly into the frontier' stream.

Hong-Kong itself is, of course, an island, al surly great lump of mountain humping itself out of the sea. But leased to it by an old treaty with China are some 360 square miles of mainland called the New Territories.

At the far end of this territory is this frontier, 11 miles of it guarded by a few police posts. Occasionally there is a Union" Jack painted on tin and mounted on a stake to face China. A frayed flag flies at the main crossing, and occasionally a smart! Chinese constable, with a silver crown in his cap, will take a coolie aside as he crosses and thump his thighs looking for arms or poke about his bundles for gold.

SCOTS POLICE OFFICER

The line starts by the sea in a wide marsh where the police have a sort of modern red brick castle on a hill that frowns straight into China and where the young Scots police officer in charge complains that the view is good but that it is lonely and uncommonly dark at night. Once the sun is down, in all that vast plain not a single light shows from the thousand wretched huts and farms.

The frontier runs down a narrow valley where a trout stream divides the two ways of life, and it ends in a busy little market town which is cut in two by the line. You can tell where China starts by the sudden increase in squalor.

The Communists in the North maintain the strictest discipline. They are seldom worried now by Nationalist forces. Recently two Chinese were stopped at a police post ånd searched. One fled and as he ran an old Japanese grenade dropped from his clothing. They were both Communist soldiers and the captive at once apologised to the police for his comrade, said he never knew he had arms with him, that of course it would be his duty to report him on his return to China, and that his comrade would be most severely punished, perhaps shot, since they were strictly forbidden to carry them in the New Territories.

Sometimes from the other side of the line there is a little fighting, bandits perhaps or local disagreement, and a roll of musketry comes up out of the plain to the constables at their tea. Recently a British officer ... watched a full-scale bandit raid on a village some three hundred yards away, but it was on the other side of the trout stream and her could do nothing.

NIGHT SMUGGLING

Occasionally after one of these incidents a couple of men may come limping across the Bailey bridge with wounds staunched with rags

"Accident with a gun is the invari- able excuse, and they and any sick that cross receive free treatment without question. Hong-Kong by law and in fact is wide open. Only the fact that most Chinese in these remote districts are desperately afraid of Western medicine keeps the trickle of sick to a manageable size.

There is smuggling at night, of course. Junks slip up and down the coast and little low sampans inch through the marches loaded with rice. The smugglers want good Hong-Kong dollars instead of the worthless gold yuan they get in China. They are left almost alone. Chinese deserters cross this no-man's land, and bandits sometimes for robbery in Hong-Kong, which has a fairly formidable crime rate. Across it, too, flee fugitives from the Hong-Kong police murderers, the bandits going home, the clerk who has landed in trouble.

How long it will remain in its present tense immobility no one knows. The lease has 45 more years to run. In a perfunctory way from Peking, the Communists have said they must have all this land back. No British cross the line any more. No contact is had with anyone beyond it. The villages you can see on the plain, each with a square white tower for the village pawnbroker, might be on the other side of the moon.-Copyright.

C0537/4825

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Scotsman

2 5 APR 1949

Mr Ha

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Mr Sideborham. Mr. W. d. J. Wallace

Mr. Hastorsan

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IDCode TriSITUTO NURTULK UK.

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