H.K. COMMUNITY MUST DO ITS PART
MARCUS SILVA
IN A BROADCAST FROM Z.B.W.
China Mail, February 22, 1945
Some of you know me — and of me; some do not. Those that do — know that I was born in Hong Kong. I practised in Hong Kong as a solicitor for 14 years before December, 1941. Stayed in Hong Kong under the Japanese regime till October, 1948. In May, 1948, the Jap gendarmes took me in as a political suspect for a period of two months and gave me everything they had in the way of torture and beatings.
November, 1948, I went into Free China. I returned from Kunming over 10 days ago. You will appreciate, then, that I know what I’m talking about — not merely theorising.
A year and a half ago, I sat in an office at Kweilin and found my eyes wandering to the big map opposite me. It was a map showing in detail the Island of Hong Kong, Kowloon and the hinterland, and a variety of nostalgic feelings surged up in me as I looked at the greens and the browns shading the land on the map and the deep and lighter blues of the seas around.
I have lived in Hong Kong most of my life, as you have done. I have climbed its hills as a youngster, and many a time have I crossed the harbour on the Star Ferry at night and felt a sense of exhilaration and pride as I looked at Hong Kong by night. But — I’ve also seen the lights go out in Hong Kong and in the hearts of its people. Dimmed and crushed by the stubby fingers of a Japanese Hand — stepped out beneath a ruthless, ground-scraping Japanese Heel.
Then — Hong Kong by night was a dull, drab blot against a duller, drabber night sky. Today though, I see Hong Kong again by day and by night — and at night, the lights are on again, beginning to blaze out all the way from Connaught Road to the Peak — scintillating, twinkling, sparkling and alive.
My mind goes back. I was in the Mongkok Police Station in a cell 8 feet by 6 feet. Everything inside of me strained towards the window high up, thinking of the outside world, the sunshine and freedom that I longed for from the bottom of my soul — hoping and praying — praying and hoping — until I felt — almost — that there was no God to listen to my pleas, no Heaven to fulfil the lingering hope in my heart. I say “almost”, because if I should have given up believing altogether, it would have meant sheer madness, the madness and insanity of blackest despair.
And one of the Indian guards stole into my cell-door and whispered words of encouragement: “... Never mind, Mr. Silva. You will get out, and after a while the British will come back and everything will be all right again...“
Some of you are beginning to lose that fear that was the Japanese weapon of rule. The Japs, if you will cast your minds back, did not rule by the weapons of a free Government and a free people — law and order — they ruled by the cracking of the whiplash, and each and everyone of us walked around the streets in Hong Kong furtively looking over our shoulders — afraid to talk, afraid to whisper — every visit — every vestige of freedom — that inalienable right of every human — taken away from us.
That freedom today is being given back to you again by the British Government. But — like all humans, some of you begin to grumble and mutter occasionally here in there: “... this... that... reconstruction so slowly going into effect....”
Because we have been deprived of this freedom of action and of speech for so long, we have forgotten that freedom entails individual cooperation on the part of each and everyone of us. In the exercise of this blessed freedom returned to us, we must cooperate wholeheartedly with every benevolent action of Government so that Hong Kong will get back on to its feet at the earliest possible date.
Let us take a specific example. As I personally interpreted — and I must make it clear at this stage that I am no Government spokesman official or unofficial but am just exercising my right to freedom of speech, and right readily granted to me by the Broadcasting Studio. I am making this broadcast as an ordinary citizen, and my personal interpretation of Government’s actions: —
in pegging the Hong Kong dollar to the pre-war rate of 1s 8d; and again
in selling rice at a loss to government, at 20 cents per catty;
— is that Government was adopting basic measures to bring the Colony back to pre-war prices and to check inflation and price increases. I, and also you, have witnessed the evils of inflation without the necessity today of a too pointed reference to the vicious circle it creates.
You have seen in a comparatively short period rice and other commodities increase in prices from about One Military Yen to hundreds of Military Yen. What was sufficient in January to cover a month’s expenses was insufficient for half a month in March, and the result was a ding-dong battle of individuals and firms in demands for higher and higher prices, higher and higher wages, higher and higher, even ricksha fares. No one could control this mounting scale of the cost of living, and NO ONE TRIED.
You want freedom — of the widest sort — because you have had your bellyful of control and of living under the dark canopy of fear as you have known it for the last 3 and a half years.
You do not want Government to set ceiling prices, commandeer supplies, stores, commodities, organise squads of price control inspectors, make arrest for infringements of price control — you want to revert back to the old pre-war days, when prices were steady and reliable; when you knew in March what you would have to spend in living expenses and for the Christmas festivities in December; when you could buy your packet of 20 cigarettes for thirty cents, get your cup of coffee for 25 cents. Then, I ask you, why under the sun do you not cooperate with Government in Government’s attempt to revert to those days and those prices?
Why must you continue to think in terms of the tremendous prices you paid for the cost of your stock in terms of the rotten Military Yen and do your best to sabotage the true value of the Hong Kong Dollar?
Can you not realise that if you sell your length of cloth in terms of Hong Kong Dollars at six times its pre-war price, the cigarette-seller in the street who had to buy your cloth to cover his person has to charge you six times the pre-war price for the cigarettes you desire to enjoy? And that the six thousand dollars you amass in this manner is only equivalent in purchasing value to the $1000 you’re amassed pre-war?
You cannot expect to act in the selfish, non-cooperative manner and say: “Let the next man lower his prices and thereby bring back pre-war living standards, whilst I steal a march on the majority and amass a fortune by demanding high prices for my goods,” and not have it boomeranging back on you onto you where it hurts most: your pocketbook.
I called in my Chinese tailor the other day and he charged me exactly what he was charging pre-war for a suit of clothes. His unsolicited statement was, “I want to do my bit in reverting to pre-war prices.“
Now, if everyone of us did that, the day might come again when your HK$100 would give you a comfortable month’s living.
In that Japanese gendarme gaol, I learned the real true preciousness of Freedom, as you too have learned it in the past in the vast Japanese prison that Hong Kong was only a short month ago.
When I got out of Hong Kong in 1948, I appreciated in full the inner significance of beauty of the Four Freedoms promised us by the United nations, OUR United Nations — Freedom from Want from, from Fear, of Worship and of Speech. If you want Hong Kong, your Hong Kong, to be bathed and flooded in the light from these Four Beacons, where there had been Darkness and Despair, then do your little bit — cut your prices down, refuse to buy from the man who charges too highly, cooperate in every way with Government. For today, each man must do his bit, because today is the day of the Common-Man or as Henry Wallace has put it — “The Century of the Common Man” — and that means YOU.
