[M] I originally intended to include Burma here but I appear to have fallen sick.

[RETRO] The tarnished Pearl of the Orient

After months of continuous protesting and rioting, the unrest in Hong Kong was simply running out of both support and willpower. While the protests had initially enjoyed much sympathy from the population, their increasingly violent attacks and open embrace of communism drove off many potential supporters.

The arguable turning point in public support came on April 12th, 1958, when a bomb disguised as a pineapple, intended for British road patrols, killed six young children attempting to cut it open. Anticommunist media organizations and the British colonial government made good use of the incident to convince peaceful supporters of the protest movement to stay home. Furthermore, after months of unrest, working-class neighborhoods with large communist populations were becoming increasingly unlivable for families due to the closure of schools for suspected communist activism, cutoff of public services, constant police raids, and the overall uptick in violence. The labor organizations began to see their strongholds increasingly denuded of the people needed to shield them from retaliation and provide resources from outside.

The other killing blow was the abrupt cutoff of support from the mainland, likely caused by British recognition of the PRC. While the annexation of Macau briefly reinvigorated the protest movement, in the end, with their strike funds running thin and their less-than-legal income sources slowly drying up under police pressure, and public support increasingly turning against them, the Federation of Trade Unions was forced to call off the protests and return to normal life. A number of key leaders, accused to abetting terrorism against the authorities, fled to the mainland, while the vast majority of workers who had only taken part in peaceful protests simply returned to their jobs.

When they did this, they found that the rights traditionally afforded to the unions had been dramatically scaled back in return for concessions with regards to minimum wage levels. This policy change was naturally unpopular - workers wanted to feel that they had agency in determining their conditions. The unpopular law briefly set off another round of protests, but sheer exhaustion meant they never had any chance of succeeding. A legal challenge by the FTU claiming the law had been improperly implemented had more success, but LegCo simply passed it again in the way advised by the court, and that was that.

Hong Kong has since puttered along much like before. Levels of discontent are still high but decreasing as the economy improves, but investors are still wary of doing business in Hong Kong after the long and bloody period of unrest. Slowly, this perception of danger is fading as years pass without major incident, but the economy of the colony has been set back in the meantime.

[ALERT] The other Pearl of the Orient

Ceylon’s 1965 Parliamentary elections proved to be a watershed for the country. For the past four years, the centrist United National Party had held a tenuous grip on power through a coalition with the Tamil Congress. They generally stayed the course - no changes to language policy, no changes to the basing situation, and only minor populist economic gestures. This proved to be insufficient to maintain their popularity. In the next election, while their key constituency of Sinhalese elites stuck with them overwhelmingly, the Sinhalese working class defected en masse to the ethnic nationalist Sinhala Maha Sabha party, which argued for leftist economic policies, nonaligned foreign policy, and Sinhala dominance of society. While the prevailing economic conditions (mediocre at best) played a major role in the UNP defeat, the use of anti-Tamil rhetoric by the SMS also certainly contributed to the result.

In the end, the UNP government under Dudley Senanayake survived, but only through a coalition with the All-Ceylon Tamil Congress. In exchange, the UNP began drafting legislation to replace English as the official language of Ceylon with both Sinhala and Tamil, enshrining the rights of both into the law. English would be reduced to a mere “common language,” to be used only when the other two came into conflict. Another major change to policy was the announcement that all British bases would be removed from the country by 1968. Ceylonese of all ethnic and social classes had long felt that the bases were an imposition of a colonial past, and the UNP merely bowed to public opinion in the hopes of preserving a generally pro-Western foreign policy orientation.

In response to the language bill, the SMS mobilized in full force. First protests, then riots broke out on the streets of Colombo, attacking young Tamil workers and demanding greater respect for the majority Sinhalese. Senanayake himself narrowly survived an assassination attempt from a member of a Sinhalese nationalist group. The newly trained Ceylon Defense Force has remained professional so far, but the officers of the overwhelming Sinhalese organization are reporting unrest among the ranks…