Cultural Revolution along the Seacoast of Hong Kong

This paper analyzes the impact of the Cultural Revolution on Hong Kong through examining media accounts of border-crossing horrors in Hong Kong territorial waters in the late 1960s. Reports of dead bodies along the coastlines of Hong Kong and Macau made daily headlines in KMT-affiliated newspapers in the summer of 1968. Most of these floating bodies belonged to the young Red Guards who were killed during the factional struggles in the Guangdong Region. At the same time, there were numerous reports of cross-border kidnapping of fishermen and oyster farmers in the peripheral region of Lau Fau Shan in Hong Kong by self-claimed People's Commune members in Shenzhen. Besides kidnapping, fishermen from Hong Kong were often forced to attend Communist study sessions in mainland China. These accounts of coastal communities in Lau Fau Shan show that cross-border kidnappings did not begin with the case of the booksellers two years ago, but had historical precedence since the 1960s. More importantly, these incidents reveal that the sea border separating mainland China and Hong Kong was much more ambiguous and porous than the land border. Even though the main victims of such incidents were mainland Chinese or people living in remote areas in Hong Kong, such media accounts gradually generated a sense of terror among the residents in Hong Kong about the Communist regime in the PRC. These accounts left a deep impression that Communist Regime in China was brutal and mainland China was no longer the home to which transiting people could return. These memories and imaginations of the PRC continued to haunt the people living in Hong Kong in the following decades.