Hong Kong by Gene Gleason

Hong Kong is a high point on the skyline of the Free World. As a free port operating on a free-world basis, it is too valuable to lose.
—SIR ROBERT BROWN BLACK, Governor of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, 1962
Except for Portugal’s tiny overseas province of Macao, Hong Kong is the last Western outpost on the mainland of China. It is the Berlin of East Asia, poised in perilous balance between two ideologies and two civilizations.
The government and people of Hong Kong have performed a matter-of-fact miracle by saving the lives of more than a million refugees from Red China. Without appealing for foreign aid or emergency subsidies from the home country, the colony’s rulers have provided jobs, homes and freedom for the destitute. Private charitable organizations overseas and outright gifts from the governments of Great Britain and the United States have achieved miracles on their own in feeding, clothing and educating the poor of Hong Kong, but the main burden is too great to be borne by any agency except the full public power of the royal crown colony.