Smuggle or Die

Across the river mouth from Hong Kong on the mainland of Red China is the tiny (eleven square miles) Portuguese colony of Macao, whose legitimate industries are the packaging of matches, firecrackers and Sin. Into Macao one day last week came the Portuguese ship Rovuma, with a cargo of iron and steel plates, machine tools and industrial chemicals. That night coolies shifted the Rovuma's freight into motorized junks, which began moving up the Pearl River toward Canton.

Smuggling, for centuries a profitable career in these waters, has been brought to an art by the Communists. Peking maintains an official purchasing agency in Macao called the Nan Kwong Trading Corp. Smugglers get an order from Nan Kwong, then wangle a Macao government import permit, place their order somewhere in Western Europe, and wait for the ships of the Portuguese-owned Companhia National de Navegac,ao to arrive. When the smuggler delivers the goods, profits are enormous.

Secure Smuggling. When the Communists withheld their orders for a couple of months last winter, Macao almost skidded into bankruptcy. Portugal is pledged to enforce the U.N. embargo on strategic materials entering Red China, but the colony of Macao lives in such absolute dependence (even for food and water) on the Communist mainland that it considers it a question of smuggle or die.

By cracking down on freelance smugglers and the pirates who lived on them, the Communists have made smuggling operations in this area comparatively secure. Red gunboats constantly patrol the Pearl River estuary, and the oldtime speculator who ran the blockades with mixed cargoes has disappeared. The Communists ask for and get only strategic materials. Not satisfied with waterfront facilities at Macao, they have set up their own transfer port for smuggled goods on the islet of Lap Sap Mei between Macao and Hong Kong. Here, instead of lightering, overseas ships tie up at a new pier, unload into junks of sufficiently shallow draft to make the mud banks up to Whampoa, or transship for Tientsin and Dairen. Through Lap Sap Mei now travels about one-third of all shipping to China. Most of the ships that call there are Communist-owned, but occasional vessels flying Western flags, including the Union Jack, have been spotted.

Expensive Trade. Lap Sap Mei and Macao are an enticement to the thousands of desperately poor junk people in Hong Kong who are ready to risk their lives to earn a few hundred dollars running contraband. Under U.N. pressure, British authorities have stepped up their efforts to enforce the embargo.

Typical contraband seized by the British last month: auto clutch plates hidden under a load of fish, 2,712 Ibs. of scrap iron disguised as ballast, 82 tons of asphalt passing as dirty, but legal, coal tar. The British concede that about 200 tons of merchandise -- about 1,000th of Hong Kong's intake--gets across to the Communists every week. Even with what goes in to Macao and Lap Sap Mei, it is not enough for the building of industrial China. Only peace and a resumption of normal trade would do that.

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