Hey Everyone,
I'm in the middle of a partial update here, but wanted to get some feedback from readers as I move forward to finish the chapter. Comments and questions welcomed!
© Paul Goodfellow and After the Scifi Apocalypse, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Paul Goodfellow and After the Scifi Apocalypse with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
“THE PROTEST”
KOWLOON, NEW TERRITORIES
CROWN COLONY OF HONG KONG
MAY 1987
“…When the Residency Riots broke out in 1987, most of the government’s leadership did not expect them to continue for as long as they did, or with the violence and urgency that protesters brought. Three years after the nuclear exchange, and more than a year after the end of the Work Quota Ration System, the mainland refugees who lived in the colony were at their breaking point. A 1986 ruling from the Hong Kong Supreme Court had rendered the question of residency a pressing issue, when the court found that there were no legal grounds for the denial of permanent residency to wartime refugees by the Hong Kong civil administration. But, the court did not immediately grant permanent residency to the plaintiff. Known as Hsiang v. Kowloon Neighborhood Housing Authority, this case had opened the issue up to public debate and turned an open wound into a festering one.
Weekly protests of refugees seeking permanent residence in Hong Kong and their allies from local civil society tore the city apart. When the residency protests turned into a general city strike, government officials and military leaders were ill-prepared for what came next. The central question of the protests (Should mainland refugees be recognized as full permanent residents of Hong Kong and granted the same rights to public services like education and hospitals as those who arrived before February 1984?) became the biggest single issue in city politics since the end of the Second World War.
Escalating levels of violence among protest marchers disrupted city life and called into question the legitimacy of the Hong Kong Police and the city’s military garrison at a time when the Legislative and District Councils were wholly un-representative of city politics. The April 1987 passage of a controversial bill to extend the colony’s State of Emergency through 1990 added fuel to the fire and drove even more residents to join mainland refugees in the streets. The rump Foreign and Colonial Office (FCO) abdicated responsibility entirely. The now-infamous April 20, 1987 communique from FCO Offices in downtown declared the city to be ‘…under the joint control of the British garrison and Governor-General Youde for the duration of the emergency.’ While recently declassified documents showed significant infighting between pro- and anti- factions within the FCO, this was not public knowledge at the time.
With Britain half a world away, devastated by Soviet wartime nuclear strikes, and central government barely hanging on, there was little hope that protests would reach the floor of the rump British parliament. The city’s commonwealth allies of Australia and New Zealand were also in the throes of postwar recovery. Both powers declared early in the crisis their refusal to intervene in a wholly internal civil matter. With outside powers refusal to comment or intervene; colonial and civil authorities were left on their own to settle this extremely contentious issue…”
David Kwok, “The 1986-87 Kowloon Residency Riots and Postwar Reconstruction: The Foundations of a Multi-Cultural Democracy in South China,” Asia Historical Review, Vol. 68, Iss. 4, pp. 30-65 (2044)
The crowd pressed against the man, shoulders and arms mashed against his sides, feet moving collectively down the street, an inexorable pull towards the front of the crowd. It was all flesh and cloth against him; arms raised up holding protest signs, fists clenched in defiance, shouts hard against his eardrums. Their voices were thrown to the heavens and echoed against the steel and concrete buildings on all sides of them; a canyon of steel, glass, and concrete that concentrated their voices into a solid mass.
It was a slightly overcast day, he noticed, with the sun burning through the cloud cover, rays poking through a low-hanging gray carpet. It had rained that morning, a light drizzle that cooled the city down slightly though the humidity was still near one-hundred percent. Above them, he could hear the low drone of a few air conditioners running in nearby buildings.
Probably government officials, he mentally remarked.
The crowd had gathered for the second time that week. It was unusual for protest organizers to call a second march for the week, though given the status of bills circulating through the Legislative Council it made sense. LegCo was once more taking up the issue of refugee residency and service access, meaning that they had the opportunity to present their case on a public stage to city elected officials. The man did not know much about elected representatives. He was a refugee from Guangzhou who had the good fortune of crossing the border before the bombs fell. When the Soviets launched their strikes on February 23, 1984, the man was hiding in a public shelter in Kowloon. They had spent weeks underground waiting out the fallout from Guangzhou and elsewhere. Once they emerged, they and their fellow refugees had been put to work on decontaminating the city, cleaning up the dead, and now working on the numberless small vegetable farms that had sprouted up in every spare corner of the territory. Across the border, starvation reined in the numberless refugee camps that sprang up between Lo Wu and the Guangzhou suburbs.
For three years now, he and his wife had lived in the city but were denied basic services. They could not go to public hospitals, their children could not attend city schools, and their official status marked on all paperwork as, ‘TEMPORARY REFUGEES - NON-RESIDENCE STATUS IN HIS MAJESTY’S CROWN COLONY OF HONG KONG.’ The man, known as Li Deng Miao (Deng Deng to his friends), had no idea who the British monarch was, and cared less for whether or not he considered him to be a resident of the city or not. Hong Kong was his home, as far as Deng was concerned.
“What do we want?”
“RESIDENCY”
“When do we want it?”
“NOW!”
The shouts carried high over their heads. The marchers numbered in the thousands, Deng estimated. They shouted in unison, though their languages were varied. He heard Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and a few dozen village dialects bellowed by his fellow marchers. March organizers yelled the prompts in Cantonese and Mandarin into weather beaten megaphones.
The cacophony of language was almost too much to make sense of, Deng thought as he listened to the shouts echo out over the cityscape.
There were only a few vehicles parked on the side of the road; a smattering of police sedans, Land Rovers with government plates, and a few lorries with British Army markings. There was an occasional large truck that looked modified to run off steam, which had been a regular sight during the Japanese occupation both in Hong Kong as well as in Shanghai. But here, in the heart of Kowloon, those were a rarity. Most coal was heavily rationed for electrical generation, which meant that obtaining large amounts of it to run a sedan or lorry for personal use was illegal. The ubiquitous prewar red, green, and blue taxi cabs had been parked after the city’s gasoline supply was cut off for civilian use. Everyone was using either the city subway system, double-decker buses which were modified to run on steam engines burning heavily rationed coal (which meant running on limited schedules), or hailing rickshaws again. The city had reverted in a lot of ways back to living standards last experienced in 1945.
Li looked around and tried to spot his neighbors who told him that they were going to be here at the march. The whole of the Walled City, it seemed, had turned up to the rally. Though none of them could vote, they all knew what bills were up in front of LegCo.
Everyone circulated the limited numbers of papers that the South China Morning Post could put out every other day. The paper was wafer thin, and LegCo had issued legislation just after the exchange mandating paper recycling for all printed materials, “For the duration of the international crisis.” Almost a year after the Soviets turned Guangzhou and a few other locations in Guangdong Province into radioactive cinders, government officials had managed to get a few small paper factories back up and operating in Shenzhen. Most of the paper was destined for government offices to keep the bureaucracy functioning, with a much smaller amount set aside for newsprint, magazines, and public information. Only the black market hubs managed to circulate paper, cardboard, and prewar civilian goods back into the city, though at heavily inflated prices.
Even after the apocalypse, the bureaucracy is busy filing paperwork and memos, Li thought, a Cheshire cat grin spreading across his face.
I doubt that even the devil himself has as efficient a bureaucratic force as Britain or China, Li mused as he looked out at the faces of the crowd around him.
He had ordered his wife and daughter to stay at home in the Walled City. There had been rumors floating around that there would be political extremists in the protest crowds. The old forces of the hard left that had turned up in ‘68 to throw petrol bombs at the police had grown up, though there were still quite a few radicals left on college campuses who could get the job done. Li could make out a protest sign off to his left; characters were scrawled in deep black on a piece of brown cardboard covered in stains. The sign read, “RESIDENCY AND VOTING RIGHTS FOR MAINLAND REFUGEES.” To the right was another sign, held up by what looked to be a college student. She was no older than twenty. She had a fiery look on her face. The sign she lofted, characters in bright red paint on white card-stock (Obviously stolen from government stocks at the university, Li thought), reading: “ALL POWER TO THE KOWLOON PEOPLE’S POLITICAL CONFERENCE! DOWN WITH BRITISH COLONIALISM!”
Li rolled his eyes at the sign. He remembered vividly the extremism of the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou, the calls for permanent revolution from the Chairman and the Red Guards. Mobs gathering outside universities and residential blocks to berate ‘intellectual counter-revolutionaries.’ As bad as things were in Hong Kong, they were not yet as bad as they had been in ‘68. There was now a growing amount of food for rations, refugees were allotted 1300 calories a day for strenuous labor thanks to the burgeoning local farm output and trade deals with the Australians, Kiwis, and South America, and no one was making political dissidents swallow buckets of thumbtacks.
“WHAT DO WE WANT?”
“Residency!”
A man next to Li elbowed him and motioned towards another college student off to the right of them, holding up a wooden sign with characters reading, “DOWN WITH RESIDENCY LIMITS! UP WITH THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTION!”
“Do you think any of these kids remembers the Chairman or the Red Guards?” He shouted over the din in accented Cantonese. He had the enunciation of someone who had been to school and was used to speaking to a well-educated audience.
“They’re too young to be fucking, never mind remember what happened in ‘68,” Li replied.
“Dumb kids. The last thing I want to be associated with is anyone calling for another ‘People’s Revolution,’” the man replied.
“You from the mainland?” Li asked.
“Guangzhou. I taught at Guangdong Normal University, professor of Political Theory and Economics.”
“Well fuck me, and I’m just a lowly factory worker from Shenzhen,” Li replied, a sardonic grin spreading across his small mouth.
“You live around here?” The professor asked.
“Walled City with my wife and daughter. You?”
“I managed to get into a small public apartment before the bombs fell.”
“How did you land that?”
“I convinced a few friends of mine at City University, Hong Kong to get me in on a teaching contract. After the government announced wage and price freezes that December, the uni locked me in at a visiting salary rate. Still better than nothing, right?”
“Count yourself lucky,” Li replied. “I’ve been working as a farm laborer for the last two years out near Sai Kung.”
“How bad is it?”
“It’s gotten better since ‘85. They had my family and I on decontamination up at Shek Kong and Tuen Mun after the ambient radiation levels fell.”
The two of them looked around at the protest march, realizing that most of the protesters had little experience in actions such as this, never mind pressuring a Western-style political entity to push through a bill of citizenship.
“You think this will work?” Li asked the professor.
He shook his head.
“Nah. This is all to blow off steam. I doubt very much that they will listen to our demands before voting.”
“Why do you say that?”
The professor motioned around them.
“Do you see any foreigners mixed in with the crowd here?”
“No.”
“There’s your answer.”
******************************
TRIAD-RUN BAR
KOWLOON WALLED CITY
The room was mostly empty, save a few persons seated in chairs or at small tables. Lighting in the room was limited to a few spotlights and red lighting. A stage had been built at the front of the room. A female singer was leading a band playing a cover of a prewar song, “Major Tom.” She had a thick Tokyo accent, which bled over into her pronunciations of the song. The band’s name was written on a kick drum, “Tokyo Kids.” Not that there was much left of Tokyo now after the exchange, but the name fit all the same. A few waitresses walked around the room delivering drinks or packs of cigarettes to the patrons in the bar.
There was one man seated at a couch which looked directly out at the seating area and stage from the rear of the room. He was larger, much more rotund than the rest of the patrons. Three years after the Exchange, it was hard to find anyone who was still carrying extra weight around Hong Kong, never mind the rest of the world. He had his arms spread out on the upper rim of the couch; two of the waitresses sat on either side of him, legs crossed, dressed in short skirts and tank tops. One was puffing away on a cigarette, while the other was sipping at a clear seltzer in a highball glass. The man seated between them had a grin on his face and a lit cigarette dangling from his left hand. Smoke drifted lazily towards the ceiling. Occasionally, someone would approach him bringing a few pieces of paper or whisper something into his ear. He would glance at the paper or nod as they spoke and provide short answers of a few words.
One of the girls shifted in her seat to speak in his ear.
“You want to get out of here?” She asked, leaning over slightly to show off her cleavage.
He glanced down and gave her a disdainful look.
“I’m in the middle of something,” he replied, his voice thick with annoyance.
“Doesn’t look like it,” she replied, leaning over a bit more.
He shoved her upright with his elbow.
“Shut the fuck up,” he replied.
“You don’t have to be such an asshole,” the girl replied.
She looked back at the band, which had moved onto a cover of a prewar Japanese pop song, a sullen look painted on her face. The man examined her for a moment, thinking about how to handle the situation. He was not used to sullen call girls giving him lip. Most of the time, they were paranoid that he would have them killed and their body dumped in the river.
Girls were cheaper now than they had ever been. When the government had even the rich foreigners out helping with farm planting, everyone was eager to find ways to pay the bills or meet LegCo’s work requirements in some way. He had deals with a few of the local District Council elected representatives. He’d keep them rolling in rations and pay-offs, they’d put down on official records that he and the rest of his employees were doing the King’s work on local Kowloon truck farms. It was not as if the police would launch a raid in the Walled City if someone got wind they were avoiding the work-for-rations requirement. And, it was not as if he needed the government’s 1300 calories a day. Skimming food from government depots was easier now than it had been before the war. Together with their stockpiles of canned food they had collected before the bombs fell, he and his business partners were living high in the post-war years. The only thing missing was the occasional cup of coffee and it would be as if the war never happened for him.
An assistant approached him, bowed his head, and handed him a piece of paper. The businessman motioned for him to move off to the side while he read it.
Dumb fucking kid blocking my view of the band, he thought to himself.
Next time he steps in front of me, I’ll have to remind him of his manners.
He looked down at the piece of paper and examined the note. It was written in English. One of the girls leaned over to peer at it.
“What’s that?” She asked, pointing at the note. She spoke in Cantonese, her voice tinged with a slight Macau accent.
“None of your fucking business. Ask again and you’ll be on the street with the goddamn refugees,” he replied, his voice hard.
Her eyes went wide. She leaned back over, eyes fixed on the band, body rigid.
The businessman looked back down at the note to read it.
“PROTESTERS MOVING DOWN NATHAN ROAD, PAST WATERLOO INTERSECTION. PREDICT CLASHES ONCE THEY REACH THE RHKP STATION NEAR JADE MARKET. RECOMMEND YOU MAINTAIN PHYSICAL DISTANCE FROM PROTEST ORGANIZERS. RIOT POLICE TO BE DEPLOYED IMMEDIATELY. GARRISON MP’S ON STAND-BY. LIVE AMMUNITION HAS BEEN AUTHORIZED IF REVOLUTIONARIES USE FORCE.
LT. WATERS, KANSU ROAD STATION, KOWLOON”
He looked the note over one more time to absorb the information, folded it, pulled out a small silver Zippo lighter, and lit the paper alight. He watched it burn until the flames reached his fingers. He dropped it and let it flame out on the blackened ground.
The businessman motioned for the assistant to come back over.
“Get back down to the street and fetch me a messenger now,” he barked. The assistant nodded immediately and left the bar.
The protesters had never been of much interest to him beyond simple intellectual curiosity. Everyone knew that their demands would not be met. There was no way that the government could extend residency and services access to nearly a million mainland refugees. Residency meant eventual citizenship, which meant voting rights in District and Legislative elections. For the police, that meant eventual electoral threats to their relationship with him and his friends. The status quo was preferable to shaking things up even more than they already had been in 1984.
The businessman motioned for another one of his assistants to approach. The assistant was a slight man; short and stocky with small, narrow eyes and a military buzz cut. The businessman hired him just after they came out of the fallout shelters in March 1984. He guessed the man had been ex-PLA, given his tendency towards violence and preference for torture to extract information when required. The assistant never told him where he was from originally, beyond a vague reference to somewhere in Hubei Province. The assistant approached and gave him a small bow.
Where the fuck did that come from, he thought to himself, giving the man a puzzled look as he stood before him.
“We’re going to need to secure some of our places of business down near Jade Market. I don’t want any of our shop-owners aligning with the protesters. If any of them provide the protesters safe harbor, make it clear to them that this behavior is unacceptable. No outright killings. We need the revenue,” he ordered.
The assistant gave a single nod in reply, bowed, and left.
The apocalypse has scrambled his proletarian wiring if he’s bowing to me, the businessman thought.
*******************************************
RHKP JADE MARKET STATION
KANSU ROAD AND CANTON ROAD INTERSECTION
KOWLOON, NEW TERRITORIES
The Portuguese officer gave the officers a sideways glance out of the corner of his eye from his seat. He had been in the station for several hours listening to the British-trained police officers and their military partners from the British garrison and the international military forces try to coordinate. The Americans, leftovers from what was left of the 7th Fleet, numbered in the thousands. Enough to sway decision-makers, but not enough to move them entirely over to their court.
“I won’t open fire on protesters and have another goddamn Kent State on my hands. There’s a difference between enforcing internal security and assisting you in suppressing an internal political movement. If you want this settled, deal with it on your own,” the American officer declared.
He was given a scathing look from a Royal Hong Kong Police commander in response.
“Part of our agreements with the American government remnants in Walla Walla included your following our orders,” the British officer declared, eyes narrowed in a stiff glare at the America.
The American returned a fiery glare of his own.
“I won’t have their blood on my men’s hands,” he declared.
Don’t use them, Americans are piss poor riot control police. Didn’t you see the TV broadcasts from Chicago and Kent State? The Portuguese officer mused.
A British Army officer was busy looking at a map of the area.
“Look, they’re going to funnel here, right down Nathan Road. As long as we keep them from reaching Chungking Mansions, we should be able to control the protesters and limit their strategic access to lower Kowloon and the Cross-Harbor Tunnel,” he declared.
Someone with brain cells, what a shock, he thought, sarcasm heavy.
“If Chungking Mansions empties out and they all join the marchers, we’re going to get fucking swamped,” declared the RHKP officer.
“There’s no reason for them to do so. The majority of residents and shopkeepers in Chungking Mansions are all permanent residents,” another RHKP officer stated.
“You don’t know that. A lot of them are unhappy with the status quo already. Many of the mainland residents are former inhabitants of the Walled City themselves. They might feel a sense of camaraderie with the marchers. We can’t risk another three or four-thousand marchers joining them,” the first RHKP officer retorted.
“Another three thousand won’t make much of a difference at that point,” the American officer said.
“It will if they reach our garrison at the Peninsula Hotel. Once they hit Salisbury Street, it’s a straight shot down to the Cross-Harbor Tunnel and Hong Kong Island,” the British Army officer retorted.
“That’s a choke-point,” said the American. “You can blockade the tunnel with heavy vehicles and keep them from moving across to Hong Kong Island. Besides, I doubt that protest marchers will voluntarily enter that tunnel, they can get blocked in on both sides and starved out.”
“Great, twenty-thousand dead mainland martyrs to stack with the other seventy thousand from ‘84. The morticians will be doing brisk business,” the British Army officer spat back.
“Look, if they get passed the Jade Market is there a way for us to funnel them into Kowloon Park? We know they’re not going to swamp Kai Tak. If we can channel them into Kowloon Park down here, or there’s King’s Park on the left,” the American said, pointing to a map of lower Kowloon.
“Oi Man Estates are just near there, as is Chun Man Court. That’s all public housing,” the RHKP Officer said.
“Fuck me, who isn’t pissed off with the government right now?” The American declared, sarcasm dripping from his words.
The officers were silent for a moment, the implications setting in.
The Portuguese officer stood up in the corner of the room, reached into his pocket, pulled out a silver cigarette holder, and shoved a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He lit it and took a deep pull.
“These people have spent three years under martial law, barely scraping by on heavily controlled rations. They need to be managed, otherwise you’ll lose control of the New Territories before day’s end. If they smell weakness on you, that’s the end of it,” the Portuguese officer declared.
“What the hell do you know about this?” The American replied.
“We’ve kept control over our city with few problems,” the Portuguese officer replied.
“Don’t give me this shit about maintaining control, you fuckers reversed course the moment the bombs fell and fled back into old habits” said the American.
“Sometimes the old ways are the best, especially right now. We’ve managed the city for three years with only nominal use of force,” said the Portuguese officer.
“Nominal use of force my ass, I’ve seen the torture victims you pricks dumped out in the bay,” the American spat.
“If you don’t want to listen, you can always catch a freighter back to North America. I hear that they’ve even resorted to cannibalism in some parts of the country. I’m sure that’ll be preferable to listening to me or doing what you have been ordered to do,” the Portuguese officer said.
“I won’t be spoken to in that manner,” the American said. “We haven’t fallen so far that the autocrat is giving us useful advice.”
“I was never a member of Salazar’s party, I served in Angola and Mozambique. Just as I’m sure you served in South Vietnam at some point. You want to compare track records?”
“Fuck you. I never burned hamlets down and I was never anywhere near My Lai or the other massacres. I was doing my job.”
“So were we.”
The RHKP officer stood up and slammed his fist against a table.
“That’s enough! We have enough problems on our hands without getting into an argument with one anther over governance. We’re a hair’s breath away from losing control of half the city. We’ve all heard the grumblings from the public housing units in Kowloon and the New Territories. If we give an inch, we run the risk of total collapse. They’ll swarm our units, march through the tunnel, and hold LegCo, ExCo, the the Governor hostage until they deliver,” the police officer bellowed.
The American officer shot him a look of contempt.
“This is entirely your government’s fault. We’ve ignored a legitimate ruling from the territory’s court system.”
The Portuguese officer rolled his eyes.
“Don’t give me this line about ‘legitimate rulings’ from a court system,” he spat, making quotes in the air with his fingers.
“What line, respecting the chain of civilian command, or following the courts?”
“Western legal review wasn’t designed with a thermonuclear war in mind. Giving them residency ensures that they will never leave.”
“And what is your answer then? Follow the example of Macau and start dumping refugees on neighboring islands without government resources?” The American asked.
“We don’t have the resources to spare. Hong Kong has done the same thing in Shenzhen. Those military districts and refugee camps were set up to keep them from entering the colony. You used live ammunition just before the bombs fell on civilian refugees trying to cross over at Lo Wu. Seems like you’ve already done much worse than we have.”
There was a pregnant silence after he threw that statement into the room.
“So what do we do now, then? Roll the tanks out on them?” The American asked.
The Portuguese officer took another long, thoughtful pull off the cigarette and dropped it on the ground. He blew the smoke out of his nostrils and gave the room a toothy grin of satisfaction.
“Let the RHKP fire tear gas at the protesters. When the college anarchists start tossing petrol bombs, open up on them with live ammunition. Make them understand that force will be met with force. To save the city, a few more will have to be sacrificed for the greater good,” he replied smugly.
The RHKP officers gathered in the room gave him a grim look in response.
“He’s not wrong,” said one officer. “If we give an inch, they’ll take a mile. It will be never ending until they’ve toppled the government and replaced it with their own. If that were to happen, the city would fall in on itself. We’d be easy targets for those roving militias across the border.”
“For the greater good, I suppose,” another said.
The American officer shook his head vigorously in disagreement once more.
“I won’t order my men to open fire on them. If you make us do this, I’ll let 7th Fleet Command know and they will take appropriate actions. My admiral will support the decision not to participate in this.”
The Portuguese officer shrugged his shoulders.
“Your call. Looks like we have a quorum here.”
The British officer gave him a determined nod.
“Nothing else to do now. If the Multi-National Force is going to stay out of it, then the British garrison will deploy behind the RHKP. I’d start handing out rifles to the police now. Maybe we could get away with only a few hundred wounded and a few dead at this point. Plus, they’re going to need the weapons to fight back if things go south.”
“I’ll call the armory and get a shipment of surplus Enfield’s sent up to Jade Station within a half-hour.”
“Might have problems with that,” another police officer replied.
“Why?”
“They’re marching in Wan Chai. The public housing in North Point, Quarry Bay, and Shau Kei Wan have mostly emptied out. They’ve shut down King’s Road and have blocked up Gloucester and Hennessy in Wan Chai. City Hall and Military HQ will be swamped within the hour.”
There was a sharp intake of air.
“Fuck.”
***************************
