The China Factor
The People's Republic of China
was formally proclaimed on the 1st October, 1949.
At long last the oft-quoted saying `Let the Chinese Dragon
sleep for when she wakes she will astonish the world' began to come true,
and nothing was ever to be
the same again. Now the rest of the world
had a new China to deal with; a
China with teeth and claws
that she was quite prepared to use - as she
very quickly demonstrated in Korea.
Hong Kong was but a pimple
on the new dragon's backside, and as such
went on with development and reconstruction
in the hope that China would
neither deliberately squeeze the pimple nor absent-mindedly sit on it. In
the event she did neither, but the early years of the new regime saw more
than one bloody encounter before central control was asserted
and China's
long period of introspection and social experimentation began.
