In Search of a Future

The refugees from Red Guard terror who trickled out of China last week must have done a double take as they reached Hong Kong. There, queued up in Kowloon Station beside the mid-morning train to Canton were hundreds of Chinese waiting to go home. There were teen-age girls in distinctly non-proletarian blouses, old men in bourgeois pin-striped suits, and women whose arms were draped with heavy jackets in anticipation of the chilly Chinese autumn. The refugees-in-reverse were overseas Chinese from Indonesia, some 4,000 of whom have fled back to the mainland in recent months.

Many of Indonesia's 2,500,000 resident Chinese fear that the anti-Communism that began with the failure of last October's Red coup will end in a Chinese bloodbath. Chinese merchants' shops are regularly looted, many Chinese schools have been closed, and last week the government banned all Chinese-language newspapers. Although few of the late Partai Komunis Indonesia's members were Chinese, many Indonesians harbor resentment against the overseas Chinese who dominate the nation's commerce. Peking itself has protested against anti-Chinese demonstrations in North Sumatra, where "right-wing hooligans armed with iron bars, hatchets and other lethal weapons rabidly attacked shops and stores owned by Chinese nationals."

Fully 7,000 more Chinese are waiting in the North Sumatran port of Medan for a Red Chinese ship that Peking has promised to send, but it can only carry 700 passengers. Last week 162 Chinese landed in Hong Kong from Indonesia, many of them setting foot on the mainland of Asia for the first time in their lives. Like all new arrivals, they had about them an air of ineffable hope and naivete. Said Hsiao Hsing-fa, 38, and headed for a new life in Red-ruled Canton: "I am not worried by what I read of the Red Guards, and look forward to a bright future in China."

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