Hong Kong

The National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated stations present the Pacific story. This is the story of the Pacific. The drama of the millions of people who live around this greatest sea, where the United States is now committed to a long-term policy of keeping the peace.

This, as another public service of the National Broadcasting Company, is the background story of the events in the Pacific and their meaning to us and to the generations to come. Hong Kong. One of the naughtiest problems of the Far East is tied up in the future of Hong Kong.

China wants Hong Kong back. It is as much a part of China as Liverpool is of England. Hong Kong is a British crown colony. It belongs to us. The prestige of both the Chinese and the British is at stake.

Hong Kong is not a city, but an island and a territory 390 square miles in area, just a mile off the coast of China. It is the counter over which most of China's foreign trade is transacted.

Nearly 50,000 vessels, large and small, clear its harbor each year. Britain has made Hong Kong one of the world's greatest ports. It's a free port. Open on equal terms to all, so say the British.

Five million Chinese have not died, so that the British can have Hong Kong. So say some Chinese. The British have now been in control of Hong Kong a little more than 100 years. Until that time, Canton, some 90 miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, had been the center of trade in South China, especially in opium.

In the late 1830s, Lord Napier was sent out to Canton. Is this the usual sort of thing out here trying? You must remember, Lord Napier, that the Chinese regard no country greater than their own.