Speech #920053939

Speaker. there ha been much talk recently about our establishing dialogs with and our easlng travel and trade bans toward Commumist China. and about the inevitability of Pekings admission into the United Nations. Our newspapers are filled with stories giving the niinutest detail of American correspondents travels in Red China.. dowA to the barnquet menu. However. orie important and revealing factthe continuing refugee influx from the dhina .hainland into H6ng Konghas beenheglected by our press. our experts on China and our decisionmakers alike. Today I wish to call your attention to the sihiffcancd& of .the Hong Kong refugee problem .. Very few of us realize that there are nidre Chiriese escaping to -Hong Kong than East Germans scalifgor tunneling under the -Berlin Wall. The size of the iefugee influx from. Maos land -into the tiny British colony in.fact reflects the degree of political ihstability in- China. The pr 6blem dates back to the years immediately following 1949 when chaos on the mainland drove large numbers of refugees to Hong Kong. In the last 20 years. at least 1.700.000 refugees have fled to Hong Kong. accounting for over 40 percent of the islands total population. The largest monthly mass exodus from China occurred in April and May 1962. when a total of 142.000 escapees swarmed into Hong Kong. roughly over 70.000 a month. Many of us remember the picture of a young Chinese girl who sat crying when told she had to be sent back to Red China. An estimated 90.000 refugees were turned back by the Hong Kong authorities. Since then. the Chinese Communists have beefedup their land and marine patrols in order to prevent the escapees from fleeing the China mainland. Orders have been given to shoot the fugitives at sight. Those caught have to face up to 10 years of "reform through labor." Nevertheless. streams of refugees keep on flowing into the British colony. averaging well over 10.000 a year. In August and September 1968. the height of the Cultural Revolution. scores of bodies of young people. mostly those of former Red Guards. with their arms trussed behind their backs. drifted down from the Pearl River to the surrounding waters of Hong Kong. Since the British colony is 4 hours by train from Canton. clearly these were but a fraction of the persons killed in the factional strifes on the mainland.