Word: macao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week, weary but still getting along famously together, the students haunted Hong Kong like gimleteyed inspectors general. After morning classes, they visited refugee housing projects, a noodle factory for the needy, several island fishing villages. They showed up at a Hindu wedding, wandered through a Macao gam bling casino, edged to within 100 yds. of Communist China. A U.S. consular official gave them a two-hour briefing; veteran New York Times Correspondent Tillman Durdin conducted a long bull session on Red China. Equally educating were the solitary strolls that many took through teeming Asian slums, a revelation to youngsters...
...Communism is paradise! The people's communes are the ladder to heaven!" proclaimed the tattered signs nailed to the masts, but the words carried a special irony for the fishermen who manned the fragile junks. Last month 1,000 of these junks had sailed into Macao harbor from Red China, their crews and passengers ostensibly bent on celebrating Chinese New Year in the 6-sq.-mi. Portuguese province. As usual, the men swarmed ashore to jam the smoky teahouses and to try their luck at fantan. But when the long holiday was over, less than half the junks sailed...
...Though Macao is no stranger to refugees, never had so many-6,000 men, women and children-come at one time. Reason: a report that the Reds were about to start fishing communes, to match the hated land communes. To lure the fishermen back, Peking promised that the fishermen would still be able to keep up to 40% of their catch. The Communists also put pressure on Macao fish merchants not to buy from the refugees. Both pressure and promise failed. In desperation, some fishermen tried eking out a living with odd jobs ashore, or by begging in the streets...
...noon a Chinese gunboat moved into the harbor and contemptuously lay to a few yards off Macao's downtown wharves. Next day two armed motor junks began zigzagging among the fishing fleet. Later Communist police launches joined in. They fired no guns but that night far fewer junks remained...
Such setbacks came at an inopportune time. Unrest and conspicuous uprisings in communes like that of Lappa Island opposite Macao (TIME, Dec. 22) added to the national loss of face from the failure of Red guns and planes to "liberate" Quemoy and the offshore islands (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The antlike life of the communes had been greeted abroad by coolness in the Soviet Union, by horror in the West, by outspoken distaste in India. Crossing the border to Hong Kong, an Indian population expert last week said that Red China "was like...