Britain and China’s war that almost was

56 years ago, Britain and China nearly went to war over plastic flowers…

Riot police march in lockstep, protestors hurl bricks, pipes and anything else they can get their hands on. Tear gas fills the air, blood streams down faces. Slogans are chanted and blasted from loudspeakers. And above it all, The Beatles’ greatest hits blare across high-rise rooftops. 

This is Hong Kong. But it isn’t one of the pro-democracy protests that swept the city over the last few years. It is a pro-communist riot in the summer of 1967. One of many violent clashes that raged across the British crown colony as its population looked longingly over the border at the better living and working conditions that appeared to be on offer in the People’s Republic of China at the time.

Trouble had been brewing since the previous spring, when a 25 percent increase in the price of a ticket for the Star Ferry, at the time the only way for commuters to travel between the Kowloon peninsula on the mainland and Hong Kong Island, had led to angry demonstrations and a wave of arrests. 

But 1967 was different. It was a true what-if moment - a flashpoint that could have changed the course of global history.

I discovered the events of that summer when I was researching my third novel, A Game Of Deceit, and I became fascinated by the parallels with Hong Kong’s recent anti-communist troubles and how important these forgotten protests were to the future of the city.

Low-level labour disputes had been taking place across Hong Kong since February 1967, inspired by rumbling unrest in the neighbouring Portuguese colony of Macau. Then, on April 13th, the management of the Hong Kong Artificial Flower Works announced harsh new employment rules. Its workers resisted them. By April 28th, 92 of them had been dismissed by the factory for lack of productivity. This number had grown to 150 by May 6th. Dissent quickly spread and workers at other factories began to down tools, issue demands and stage rallies.

Picket lines and marches became an everyday feature of life, and Government House, the official residence of the Governor of Hong Kong, David Trench, was repeatedly besieged by leftist demonstrators. 

There was a tacit understanding between the leaders of the protests and the colonial government that the demonstrations outside Trench’s home would remain peaceful. However, on May 22nd they didn’t. At 10am, groups gathered on Garden Road, near Government House, but weren’t allowed to approach it. Some reports say one of the protestors kicked a constable in the groin for blocking his way. Others suggest the pro-communists had arrived with red-stained bandages in their pockets so they could claim false police brutality against them. What definitely happened was a riot that involved bloody clashes between the protestors and the police, burned out double-decker buses and trams, and the boarding up and smashing of shops.  

The People’s Republic exploited the political opportunity it had been handed. The Bank of China building - the only officially Chinese building in Hong Kong - was draped in twelve-storey-high banners covered in bright white and red anti-British slogans, which were also broadcast from loudspeakers installed on its roof. On May 16th, 400,000 people had marched through Beijing in solidarity with the crown colony’s workers, and the Shanghai residence of British diplomat Peter Hewitt had been ransacked. Six days later, in response to the Garden Road incident, Hewitt was expelled from China.

Tensions continued to mount through May and June. The British commando ship HMS Bulwark was dispatched to stand guard over the crown colony. Rolling general strikes were punctuated by frequent bomb attacks. The first curfew since the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II was implemented. And six speakers were fixed to the roof of the Government Information Services building to broadcast a repeating loop of jazz and Beatles hits to drown out the slogans coming from the Bank of China.

Hong Kong was a major hub for manufacturing and trade that Britain couldn’t afford to lose in 1967, yet there were fears that China would use the growing civil unrest as a prelude to forcefully demanding the return of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories, the largest part of the colony nearest the border that been leased to Britain for 99 years in 1898, to Chinese rule. 

Withdrawal plans were secretly drawn up in Whitehall and Government House. There was even an invasion of sorts by China on July 8th, when a large group armed with rifles and a roof-mounted machine gun swarmed over the border in the village of Sha Tau Kok near Shenzhen, and clashed with colonial police who retaliated with tear gas and wooden bullets.

As the pressure continued to build in the streets and corridors of power, both sides took up more extreme positions. The protestors moved to the far-left and became increasingly demanding and violent, and David Trench and the rest of the colonial government became less transigent and willing to enter any form of negotiation that would lessen their iron-fisted powers. 

The day-to-day problems of working conditions were overtaken by less tangible issues of ideology. Capitalism and communism were getting closer and closer to the knife-edge of war. Then two things happened in late August that could very easily have plunged Britain and China into full-blown conflict but, remarkably, didn’t.

The first involved the arrest of journalists in Hong Kong in an attempt to stifle the anti-colonial press, which led to the British diplomatic offices in Beijing set on fire by leftist militants. The second, which happened just two days later, was the assassination of the local Hong Kong radio host Lam Bun, who had been openly critical of the escalating protests in Kowloon. 

Either of these events might have been enough to light the spark of war. But instead they made people realise that things had gone too far and needed to be defused before they went even further.

Formal apologies were made, recriminations were avoided, extremists were spurned and more moderate voices began to be listened to. Calmer conversations were had and eventually compromise was reached. David Trench introduced some of the reforms he’d resisted so fervently before stepping down as governor, and the crown colony’s hard left went into self-imposed isolation. When the dust settled, 51 people had been killed during the riots, 832 had been injured, and 4,979 had been arrested. Millions of dollars worth of property damage had also been done. 

The events of summer 1967 very quickly faded from the official histories of China, Britain and Hong Kong. However, not only do the parallels between what took place almost sixty years ago and more recent events in Hong Kong mean the 1967 protests shouldn’t be entirely forgotten, their long-term impact also shouldn’t be underestimated.

In a way, the riots predicted what eventually happened in 1997, when the entire colony was handed over at the end of Britain’s lease of the New Territories. But they also set Hong Kong on a path that would move its economy and society away from China. 

The reforms introduced in the late sixties were followed by more further reaching ones in the seventies which paved the way for Hong Kong to become a free market powerhouse and laid the foundations for it to become an open, global city in the eighties and nineties.

So, there aren’t just parallels between the 1967 riots and Hong Kong’s recent problems. There’s actually a direct line of cause and effect linking them. 

The demonstrators who had been seeking better working and living conditions from the People’s Republic ended up receiving them from Britain. Then, a generation later, their descendents took to the streets to defend those rights against a ruling power that had once promised Hong Kong greater freedoms but had begun aggressively limiting them.