CO129-497 - Public Offices - 1926 — Page 214

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211

The Island of Shameen has for six months been entirely boycotted and the residents have had to put up with much discomfort and inconvenience. HongKong quickly overcame the inmediate difficulties of a domestic strike and expelled from the Colony all strikers who would not return to duty, but it is still languishing under a commercial boycott. Canton will not receive or despatch any vessel which makes HongKong a port of call, nor will it accept any merchandise which has been transhipped at HongKong. As the colony possesses no industries of its own and is merely a dumping-ground for cargo bound to and from South China, the botal cessation of business relations with Canton is robbing it of its very means of

subsistence.

An effort was recently made to come to some sort of an agreement but proved unsuccessful. Previously the main obstacle to negotiations was the extravagent political demands made by the Strike Committee, but towards the end of December the National Goverment, in conference with the Colonial Secretary, who visited Canton in order to arrive at a modus vivendi, agreed to shelve all political demands and to receive a delegation of Chinese merchants from HongKong which should discuss the possibility of a settlement on such lines they had no

option but to return to Hong Kong forthwith.

3. The failure of the negotiations had made it clear that the Canton administration is not sufficiently strong to override the wishes of the strikers' Committee and that both are influenced by the design of the Russians. The "Canton Gazette" has openly proclaimed that the issue is not economic but political and that the boycott must go on until more practical sympathy is

extended to the demands of the Chinese nationalist party.

It must be intensely gratifying to the Bolshevist elements

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