Journey to Hong Kong

It is reported that at a Shenzhen university, some 40 professors competed for the post of Chuzhang (處長)，a mid-level official title in the mailand’s bureaucratic system. Why is it that the professors are so keen to be an official? In most other countries, the professors and scholars are usually happy to be left focusing on their research and teaching. They don’t want to bother with administrative work. Not in China. The average basic salary in China for a professor is less than RMB25,000 (US$3,700) a year. If you are an official in the university, you will have much more, including large expenses allowances, fully paid overseas trips and even personal chauffeurs.

And they have power too – great power. The officials in the university have the biggest say on everything, from deciding which staff and courses to stay to funding distribution. So who is the top man in the university? You would think it is the President or Vice chancellor. Nope. It is the communist party secretary. Every public university, even now, has a communist party secretary who is the “decider” of the university.

For mainland’s universities to be world-class, they have a really long way to go. Not until there is revolutionary change in the society when it values free thinking and democracy.

By 1953, the Tiu Keng Leng refugee camp was already less isolated. At least there was ferry running between Tiu Keng Leng and Shau Kei Wan (筲箕灣) on the Hong Kong island.

The relative convenience in transportation had opened up employment opportunities for the refugees who ventured out to find jobs to make a living. With newly found income, some of them started to build houses they could call their homes with wood and bricks to replace the tents they had been living in.

Since Kuomingtang was not able to bring all these people back to Taiwan, it decided, under the public pressure, to give them financial support. It imposed an entertainment tax in Taiwan, and transferred the money collected to help the Tiu Keng Leng refugees. The money had supported the set up of a primary and middle school, among other things.

Education Hub

Though the refugee camp population was only 6,000 to 7,000 large, it had 5 middle schools, 9 primary schools and 3 kindergartens at the peak of its education boom. Students from all over Hong Kong travelled to Tiu Keng Leng for schooling, making Tiu Keng Leng literally an education hub. Two reasons were behind the boom. One was that the schools charged very low school fees and provided textbooks for free, and outstanding students could be sponsored for university education in Taiwan. This attracted Hong Kong’s families, especially the poor ones, to send their children to Tiu Keng Leng for education.

Another reason was that the schools were able to provide quality education. This could be attributed to the dedicated and highly qualified teachers they hired, who were recruited from among the refugees living in Tiu Keng Leng, and who were intellectuals of the era, being university or middle school teachers themselves before escaping to Hong Kong. In the beginning, they volunteered to teach in these schools for no compensation in return. They deemed it their duty to teach the kids in the camp.

History Stories: Tiu Keng Leng (part 2)

History Stories: Tiu Keng Leng (part 1)

Life in the camp (photo source: unknown)

Isolation was a big issue for the refugees. To go to the outside world, they must hike the hills for three hours before reaching Lei Yu Men, the now famous seafood spot in HK, from where they could take a boat to Sai Wan Ho (西灣河) on the Hong Kong island.

There was no road inside and around the refugee camp area either. So the refugees organized themselves to construct a path crisscrossing the camp area. The men were in charge of the construction work while the women were responsible for cooking and delivering food and drink to the men.

Road Hero
Even the roads to the outside world were constructed by the refugees themselves. A former battalion commander of Kuomingtang named Xie Yuqun (謝雨群) volunteered to take charge and the refugees threw themselves into the construction tasks under Xie’s leadership. A road was built to shorten the journey time to Lei Yu Men to half an hour from 3 hours, from where the refugees could take ferry to the Hong Kong island.

This former commander was a legendary figure. He had constructed many roads for the residents of Tiu Keng Leng since, including the road leading to Cha Guo Ling (茶果嶺), and to Nau Tau Kwok (牛頭角). He had been doing this for 30 years until passing away. In the morning, he constructed roads and in the afternoon he helped others in the camp area to fix and construct houses.

In 1965, led by Xie Yuqun again, construction was underway to build a road connecting Tiu Keng Leng to Kowloon. When the road was opened in 1966, which is today’s Po Lam Road (寳林路), the government invited Xie for the opening ceremony.

History Stories: Tiu Keng Leng (part 1)

History Stories: Tiu Keng Leng (part 3)

Intro

As a tourist to Hong Kong, you probably have taken or will take MTR, the city’s main transport system. And you probably go to the typical tourist places like Tsim Sha Tsui, Mongkok, Causeway or Central. Have you ever wondered what dozens of other places on the MTR lines are like? Maybe they are interesting places to see? Some intriguing history stories about them?

Here in this space, I am going to tell you some history stories of Hong Kong, and I will start with a name you will find on the MTR Tseng Kwan O line – Tiu Keng Leng.

Tiu Keng Leng MTR station

Tiu Keng Leng area now is a new development area, packed with mostly public housing

Tiu Keng Leng

On 26 June, 1950, several ferries transported 7,000 refugees towards a place called Diu Keng Leng, now called Tiu Keng Leng. When they boarded the place, they found it abandoned and isolated, virtually nothing except for some A-shaped sheds made of oil paper and sticks quickly built by the then Hong Kong colonial government in a matter of days to house thousands of them.

Diu Keng Leng literally means “hanging the neck” hill, where a retired Canadian official named Albert Herbert Rennie bought the land and ran a mill for manufacturing flour but the business was bankrupt in three years’ time. He hanged himself and the place was consequently named after the incident. When the refugees were moved here, the place had a level ground previously belonging to the mill and that was about all.

Wild dogs. Wild grass. No roads. No running water. No electricity. The refugees were basically dumped here by the Hong Kong colonial government. They had virtually nothing, except for the stuff they still had with them after they started escape.

The Refugees

Who were these refugees? They were people left behind by the Nationalist Party, also known as Kuomingtang, which escaped to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in China’s civil war. Many of them were government officials, military commanders and intellectuals, who were forced to flee to Hong Kong for shelter, waiting for their government to bring them to Taiwan. But for most of them, the wait was a life time. They ended up spending the rest of their lives in Hong Kong and died here.

Before they were ferried to Diu Keng Leng, the refugees lived on the Mount Davis for a few months, which was a rock hill used by the British military to defend Hong Kong against Japanese invasion during the Second World War. Only the abandoned barracks were left when the refugees flooded in. They had to put up shamble sheds themselves, using rags, straw mats and oil papers. The only wood structure on the hill belonged to the refugee office of the Tung Wah Hospital, then the city’s only charitable organization with a mission to help the Chinese in need. No public toilet. No running water. In the hot summer the hill was covered in unbearable stench, from the heat mixing with human excretion.

In early June of 1950, some communist trade union members and students came to the camp, dancing Yang Ge, a northern China dance promoted by the Communist Party as a revolutionary dance. The pro-Kuomingtang refugees were furious, and a fight ensued between the two sides, leading to causalities. To avoid further confrontation, the Hong Kong colonial government decided to move the refugees to a remote place, much further away from the city. They landed at Diu Keng Leng.

History Stories: Tiu Keng Leng (part 2)

History Stories: Tiu Keng Leng (part 3)

Since there are queries about China visa, I have looked up the information on the respective websites of China Travel Services in Hong Kong and Macau. It is obvious that if you are not a Hong Kong or Macau resident and if you want to apply for a China visa in Hong Kong or Macau, it is impossible for you to be given a multiple entry China visa. You will be given the ordinary single entry or double entry visa only, which will entitle you to a 30-day stay each time.

For the information posted by the China Travel Services in Hong Kong, check out here.  Their information is dated 30 June, 2010. So it is pretty updated. And here is the information posted by the China Travel Services in Macau.

People from the following nationalities will have to pay a higher fee for a China visa: U.S.A.; Brazil; United Kingdom; Belarus; Panama; Ukraine; Uzbekistan; Kazakhstan; Armenia; Iran; Ecuador; Angola; Ethiopia; Congo; Gabon; Cameroon; Cote D’Ivoire; Macedonia; Bolivia; Venezuela; and Chile.

The annual Hong Kong Book Fair is held in summer. This year it opens on 21 July through 27 July. It is a strange phenomenon that the annual book fair attracts 0.9M local visitors. It dwarfs even the world’s most famous industry book fair in Frankfurt which has about 0.6M visitors. You may imagine Hong Kong people like reading. They don’t. You can hardly find commuters reading a book, though they all read free newspapers, which are distributed inside and outside the MTR stations during the morning rush hours.

In fact, the city is notoriously named a “cultural desert” because there is not much cultural atmosphere here. Well, some people may not agree with that – look, there are so many cultural activities going on around the year, including the annual Hong Kong Arts Festival and Hong Kong International Film Festival. But the reality is, you can hardly survive as a professional writer in Hong Kong; and there are just a minimal number of bookstores which are usually small and which cannot afford to be located in some of the supreme shopping malls.

So Hong Kong Book Fair is a very strange phenomenon – the city is not a cultural city and yet its book fair is the world’s largest. This year the Fair has one big selling point – it has invited several renowned English writers to meet the public. They are Stephen Fry, Frederick Forsyth, Andrew Roberts, James Fenton and Anthony Horowitz, all well-known names. So if you happen to be in Hong Kong, this fair may be worth going. But do prepare for crowds and a long queue to get in.

To find out more about the fair, check out here.