Nothing was said to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had flatly opposed every attempt to whittle down Britain’s colonial possessions. Ten years after, when asked about the Roosevelt proposal, Churchill replied, “According to the American record [of the Yalta Conference], President Roosevelt said he knew I would have strong objections to this suggestion. That was certainly correct—and even an understatement.”
Chiang Kai-shek also campaigned for the return of Hong Kong to China and almost as soon as the war ended, James F. Byrnes, American Secretary of State, announced that the future status of Hong Kong would be determined at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. As soon as they learned about this, the British, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, registered their emphatic disapproval and the idea died without further discussion.
Although Hong Kong did not go back to China, the Chinese went back to Hong Kong. During the postwar struggles of Nationalist and Communist forces, thousands of their Chinese countrymen removed to Hong Kong, including virtually all who had been driven from the colony by the Japanese. But the great human avalanche came in 1949, when the Reds gained absolute control of the country. Fugitives from Communist “liberation” swarmed into Hong Kong at the rate of 10,000 a week.
One year after the Communists took over, the colony’s population reached 2,360,000. More than 330,000 people were living in hillside squatter settlements, sleeping on the sidewalks, on tenement rooftops, even in the center strip of the widest Kowloon streets. A shacktown fire in 1950 drove 20,000 persons from their homes. The next year a single fire dishoused 10,000 people, and a series of fires in 1952 burned out 15,000 others.
Sooner or later, colony officials told themselves, the refugees would return to China as the immigrant waves of other years had done. The government took a firm stand on the doctrine that it was not supposed to become the landlord for millions of its residents, but it yielded sufficiently to erect temporary wooden huts and bungalows for 40,000 squatters.
All the high-principled resolutions to stay out of the public housing business were swept away on Christmas Night, 1953. A roaring conflagration broke out at Shek Kip Mei, in Upper Kowloon, racing up the tiers of hillside shacks as if it were mounting a flight of steps. Somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 people were left homeless. About half of them found shelter with friends or relatives, and the government was plunged into the enormous task of feeding, clothing and rehousing the fire victims.