70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

H.M.S. Glengyle sails with 600 British internees. The Llanstephan Castle takes 800 Indian fomer POWs to Madras.

One of them is Vice-Chancellor Duncan Sloss, who, leaving Lindsay Ride in charge, is going to London for crucial talks about the future of Hong Kong University. In a farewell message he says:

I should like to express for myself and for the University the satisfaction we feel in the achievement of past and present students of the University during these years of horrors. Those who went into China in various services and in the Universities, with very few exceptions, have won a high name....Those who stayed behind have helped us who were prisoners of war and interned in a way that has made the difference between survival and extinction, and this at great risks to themselves.

Hong Kong is under martial law, and a proclamation this afternoon seems to deserve the overworked adjective 'draconian': eleven offences are announced to be punishable by death. Offering armed resistance to the troops is likely to lead to execution under any military regime, but damaging war supplies or wilfully misleading any of the occupation troops as they go about their duty don't seem like obviously capital offences. Of course, whether or not anyone was actually executed under such heads is another matter. 

'Lesser offences' include uttering any statement detrimental to the British Military Administration, the Forces or the Allied Governments and publishing any statement relating to the BMA or the Forces that's likely to cause 'alarm or despondency'. As the China Mail (and no doubt the SCMP) has been doing the latter on almost every page since publication was resumed it seems that this part of the decree is almost certainly not being enforced.

Source:

http://www.naval-history.net/xDKWD-BPF4512OccupationofChinaCoast1945.htm

Sloss: Clifford Mattthews and Oswald Cheung, Dispersal and Renewal, 1998, 427

Proclamation: China Mail, September 19, 1945, 2