Just a few months after arriving in Hong Kong in 1967, my parents Jack and Margaret Spackman visited Macau for a taste of what might be to come. The storm clouds of China’s Cultural Revolution had already broken over Hong Kong, but they had first arrived in full strength 40 miles away, on the other side of the Pearl River estuary.
Macau’s 1-2-3 Incident, as it is known, was sparked in November 1966 by a fairly simple dispute on Taipa Island. Police had intervened to stop demolition of a building because a permit had not been issued for the work.
Tempers flared, the Thoughts of Chairman Mao were quoted, provocation mounted and blood eventually flowed. At least two workers and 13 police officers were injured.
The leftists’ propaganda machine screamed into action, describing the incident as a ‘bloody atrocity” and daily protests, led by the Red Guards, were mounted outside the Macao governor’s residence. Eventually the chanting workers, holding high their little red books, barged their way in.
On 3 December 1966, police began forcing the demonstrators back outside. That was the signal for more demonstrators, including teachers and their pupils, to be brought into the protest lines.
Picture by Jack Spackman
More police reaction and then two days and two nights of bloody rioting left up to seven dead and scores injured. Eventually, the Portuguese authorities were squeezed into a statement of apology, signed by the governor Jose Manuel de Sousa e Faro Nobre de Carvalho on 29 January 1967, beneath a portrait of Mao Zedong.
We had arrived in Hong Kong in February, just a few weeks after the Macau government’s capitulation, and a few weeks before a similar wave of discontent broke in our new home in May. Once Jack’s health had recovered [see previous articles by Your Girl Reporter for those details] and we were settled in our flat in Macdonnell Road, my parents headed by hydrofoil to Macau on a Saturday in June. Travelling with them was my grandmother Doris.
Hong Kong, already experiencing pockets of worker unrest, got a little bit more nervous. Jack and Margaret were keen to see for themselves just what was going on in the neighbouring Portuguese colony of Macau in the months that followed.
The near-deserted vessel was the first sign of the deep economic depression Macau was enduring as a result of the troubles.
“It was Macau’s biggest day of the week for tourism and more than 30 pedicab drivers were waiting at the pier when we berthed. But there were only nine other passengers – barely a trickle of people to support the colony’s biggest economic driver,” Jack said.
Macau had been a Portuguese possession since the 16th century and in the 1960s was already an established gambling centre. Its wide streets, shaded by rows of trees and its blend of Portuguese and Chinese architecture, made it a cool and pleasant haven for visitors.
Many a tourist had derived much pleasure from wandering its cobblestone streets exchanging waves and an occasional word with the residents. But all that had changed by the time the Spackmans landed.
In an article for Australia’s Catholic Weekly, Jack described young Communists, calling themselves Chairman Mao’s Southern Red Guards, plastering their posters everywhere.
“They shook their fists when they saw my camera and I had no trouble grasping their meaning,” he wrote.
The façade of the old St Paul’s Cathedral, backdrop to many a tourist photograph, was covered in posters, some wishing a long life to Chairman Mao and others accusing the British of atrocities in Hong Kong.
“Statues of several saints still stand in their recesses in the wall above the Red slogans,” Jack wrote, “and throughout the city other Church buildings also are ‘decorated.’
“I visited an orphanage conducted by the Canossian Sisters (who have five houses in Australia) and chatted to the nuns about their work. Even while I was inside talking, a fresh poster was added to the several already on the front door.”
Jack visited two churches that weekend and found both locked and barred. “The pedicab driver told me they were opened in the morning for Mass but closed soon after. He did not have to explain why.”
Every church building, school and orphanage was similarly plastered with Communist slogans and posters.
“Teams of youths swarm the streets of the colony in broad daylight with their bundles of posters and buckets of paste,” Jack wrote.
“They wear Mao badges on their white shirts and menace anyone who attempts to divert them from their business of defacing buildings, walls, the bitumen roadways, even trees, with their posters.”
Jack reported that a large refugee centre, operated to assist Chinese fleeing from the mainland, had been closed since the Communists began to gain the upper hand in Macau’s power struggle.
British and American products were being boycotted and many shopkeepers faced ruin. And in the weeks leading up to my parents’ visit, seven Chinese-language newspapers published in Hong Kong had been banned from Macau.
It was a taste of what may be to come for Hong Kong, just 40 miles away on the other side of the Pearl River estuary, where similar protests outside the British governor’s residence and other disturbances were already a regular feature of that long, hot summer of discontent.
A year later, Jack returned to Macau for a follow-up report, published in Australia’s Catholic Weekly on 20 June 1968. He was there to witness thousands of Macau’s Catholics take part in a procession in honour of Our Lady of Fatima, a ritual which would have been unthinkable just months earlier.
According to Jack’s report, two Church publications had been suspended in the latter part of 1967 – not by the Chinese but by the Portuguese authorities – for publishing a statement by Macau’s embattled Bishop Dom Paulo Tavares that politics would not be permitted in the colony’s Catholic schools.
“While the Portuguese civil authorities were prepared to give ground in their battle with the Communists, Bishop Dom Tavares was not,” Jack wrote.
“At one stage he was a virtual prisoner in his home as young Red Guards surrounded the residence, chanting slogans and demanding that he see them. For months Dom Tavares continued to resist and slowly – and quietly – the Communists dropped their campaign against the Bishop and his church.”
Jack reported that every stratum of Macau society took part in the Fatima procession, from the Portuguese governor to the humblest Chinese labourers, with thousands watching in respectful silence. As for the bishop, he was ‘mobbed’ after the procession by his loyal flock.
© Maria Spackman 2018
First of a two-part report on the Spackman visit to Macau in June 1967. We’ll catch up with the adventures of Margaret and Doris – which were extraordinary, as you’d expect – in part two. Stay tuned!
Further reading:
The British authorities in Hong Kong often had cause for concern over events in neighbouring Macau. In 1987 Britain was pressuring Portugal not to grant citizenship rights to Macau residents, fearing Hong Kong would demand similar treatment. You can read all about it at the South China Morning Post. You may wish to shed a tear for the death of pithy headlines while you’re there:
Britain’s disgraceful pre-handover efforts to deny nationality to Hongkongers revealed in declassified cabinet files – Jeffie Lam, South China Morning Post, 24 July 2018.
You might also like this account of the 1967 Hong Kong unrest, by Your Girl Reporter – natch!
Hong Kong 1967: So you say you want a revolution
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