HK Affairs

In the spring of 1962, along the hills, rivers and bays that link southern Guangdong to Hong Kong, one of the most harrowing scenes in modern Chinese history unfolded. Tens of thousands of ordinary people, carrying whatever they could, climbed over barbed wire and swam across dark bays in the most primitive ways imaginable, risking drowning, shark attacks and bullets from border guards to reach this small patch of British-administered territory. The geographic scope alone was staggering: people came from 62 different counties and cities — Huiyang, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Nanhai, Taishan, Haifeng, Chao’an — each name marking a family pushed to the edge.

They were not fleeing war, or an enemy state. They were fleeing their own government.

What drove them to the border was the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961. The Great Leap Forward and the People’s Commune movement tore the agricultural system apart: grain output collapsed, and an estimated tens of millions died of starvation, with rural Guangdong among the worst-hit regions. In Chinese official historiography, this period would later be rebranded as the “three years of natural disaster”, with the blame placed on bad weather and the Soviet withdrawal of aid. Yet the historical record tells a different story. Droughts and floods did occur, but the decisive factor was policy itself. Collectivisation destroyed farmers’ incentives to produce. The backyard steel campaign pulled labour out of the fields. Local cadres, under pressure to meet production quotas, inflated harvest figures at every level, which in turn justified excessive state procurement. Granaries were emptied; peasants were left with nothing. The “natural disaster” was, in substance, a man-made one recorded under the name of nature.

Across the Shenzhen River, however, life in Hong Kong continued as normal. Markets had food; families ate. On one side of the boundary lay hunger; on the other, daily routine. No propaganda was needed to make the contrast land. For countless people in Guangdong, Hong Kong was not only a place to survive — it was the only place left where one could reclaim a sense of human dignity.

Those who fled were not the old and infirm but mostly adults between 19 and 40: farmers, factory workers, students. They moved not as lone adventurers but as families, clans and networks of fellow villagers, coordinating routes, pooling information, and looking out for one another. Some crossed mountain ranges and waded through the Shenzhen River. Others took to the sea, plunging into Mirs Bay or Deep Bay and swimming south toward an invisible line they had staked their lives on. The dangers were concrete: drowning, gunfire, sharks, cliffs. The New York Times reported on 1 May 1962 that some had drowned en route, their names lost to the current.

To understand the Hong Kong government’s response, it is not enough to look only at those few months of 1962. From the early 1950s onwards, the border had been running on an unwritten, two-track arrangement. Those who reached the urban areas, had relatives to lean on, and were capable of work could quietly obtain a Hong Kong identity card. Those intercepted at the boundary were repatriated. This was colonial realism in the Cold War: with roughly a hundred to two hundred successful crossings a day, the city could absorb the inflow, and its fast-growing industries needed the labour. A blind eye was the sensible policy.

The 1962 wave shattered that equilibrium. At the peak, thousands were arriving each day — far beyond what the urban areas could absorb. Premier Zhou Enlai personally ordered the Guangdong provincial leadership to take charge on the ground in Bao’an. The authorities deployed more than 10,000 troops and police, setting up interception stations along transport routes and border zones in coordination with the Hong Kong side. In the end, 51,395 people were sent back. Hong Kong itself hardened its stance on 6 May with an order to repatriate all those caught, and on 14 May formally adopted a “catch and return” policy — even those who had already entered the city would be sent back, without review. This was an emergency measure for a crisis that had outgrown the old understanding, not a new norm.

The reaction of Hong Kong society, however, was an entirely different matter. From 12 May 1962, Ming Pao ran the story day after day on its front page, forcing the city to confront the humanitarian crisis at its doorstep. Along the barbed-wire fence, ordinary residents organised themselves to hand food, clothing and water to those being held. A colonial government chose catch-and-return; the people of the colony chose to pass rice balls through the wire. That image captured the truest face of Hong Kong in that era.

After the crisis subsided, the old two-track arrangement quietly resumed. Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Hong Kong’s industries in textiles, plastics, toys and electronics expanded rapidly, those who made it to the urban areas continued to find work — and, more often than not, identity cards. The 1971 Immigration Ordinance formalised a crucial rule: any non-locally-born ethnic Chinese who had lived in Hong Kong continuously for seven years could obtain permanent resident status. It offered a legal path to regularisation for those already settled in town.

Only in November 1974 did the colonial government put a name to what had been running for more than two decades, formalising it as the Touch Base Policy. Those who reached the urban areas south of Boundary Street in Kowloon and made contact with relatives could register as Hong Kong residents; those intercepted at the frontier would be returned. At the same time, border enforcement was significantly tightened, making it harder, not easier, to reach the city. In other words, 1974 did not loosen the door — it gave the rule a name and pushed the door a little further shut. By the end of the decade, reform and opening in the mainland had set off another surge: in 1979 alone, security forces intercepted around 90,000 crossers, and an estimated 100,000 more are thought to have made it into the urban areas. On 23 October 1980, the Legislative Council abolished the Touch Base Policy and replaced it with “catch and immediately deport”. Those who had already arrived were given a three-day grace period, from 24 to 26 October, to register at the Victoria Barracks in Admiralty. Chief Secretary Jack Cater had estimated around 15,000 would come forward; the registration centre ran 24 hours a day. In the end, only about 6,900 registered. A border arrangement that had run for nearly three decades had come to a quiet close.

Seen structurally, the 1962 exodus was a comparative experiment between two systems along the same stretch of border. On one side, a system that had to deploy troops to keep its own people from leaving. On the other, a place that drew them with no propaganda at all, only the prospect of an ordinary life. The hungry cast the most honest vote with their feet — a vote that was interrupted in 1962, quietly honoured again soon afterwards, and only truly shut out in 1980. Hong Kong’s border policy, notably, never went to extremes; it oscillated between humanitarian tolerance and administrative control, never fully opening the door and never fully sealing it.

What makes this history important is not the numbers themselves but a plain fact it reveals: when a society cannot feed its own people and will not let them leave, every crossing at the border becomes a concrete verdict on the system being escaped. Those who climbed over the wire in the spring of 1962 were not a Cold War footnote. They were the final, human imprint of a famine recorded in the archives as a natural disaster — and a formative moment in the making of the Hong Kong we know today.

A large part of present-day Hong Kong was built, brick by brick, by those who risked everything to cross that border and by the generations that followed. The fate of a city is often written along its frontier.