Hong Kong's British officials greeted the Queen's arrival in this giant sweat-shop city last week with much ballyhoo. But the vast majority of the local Chinese population looked on with indifference, untouched even by the anti-colonial protest of the students' union at Hong Kong University.
Most workers were much too absorbed trying to secure their fl-a-day" income to pay the visit any heed.
Actually, strong anti-British feelings are common. But raising any protest would diverge from China's current foreign policy line of detente. Since China succeeded in 1972 in having the UN erase Hong Kong from its list of colonies, any protest against the visit of the British sovereign to her colony would, moreover, have looked inconThe man-in-the-street cares only that his economic situation is bad, and that the hubbub of the royal visit will do nothing to alleviate it.
The unemployment and underemployment figure has reached 225,000-roughly 15 per cent of the Hong Kong's regime is one of the few in the world that usually runs at a profit. The Government sends "surplus taxes back to Britain almost "reserve that is invested in the City of London, helping to prop up the ******************* ******************* A mass anti-unemployment rally in a working class district of Hong Kong organised by a group independent of Peking, the Revolutionary Marxist League. off the West African coast ment' to 'guide' Sao Tome to independence in July. But now they have Liberation of Sao Tome and Principe (MLSTP). One of them, former Minister of Information PEDRO UMBELINA, spoke to Tony Hodges about this move during a recent visit to London.
In Umbelina's opinion, the expulsion of two out of five of the MLSTP representaLIves In me covernment was me cumax o an escalating series of attacks by the Por tuguese authorities against the more radical elements of the MLSTP. The Portuguese colonialists, Umbelina explained, are determined to prevent the Sao Tome people from winning real liberation after independence. They are working to see that alter independence the interests of the big plantation owners who own nearly all the land in our country are detender.
Ravaged Umbelina told me how the Portuguese colonialists nad ravaged the islands and repressed the Sao Tome people for 500 years. I asked him what changes had occurred in the islands after the coup in found dramatic expression in the small colony of Sao Tome and Principe In February, the MLSTP ministers in the government wrote to the Portuguese High Commissioner demanding the dis bandment of the native Sao Tome troops in the Portuguese army units in the islands. His immediate reply was to mount: barrage of propaganda for law and order' and to stage a series of much-publicised army exercises in the islands to intimidate the government and the African poptila tion. Then a deal was made with a majo rity of the leadership of the MLSTP. Umbelina and Gastao Torres, Minister of Labour, were dismissea trom une govern ment and 40 members of the MLSTP were expelled from the movement *****
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working population. FARCE OF ROYAL VISIT
From U. CHEN in Hong Kong
Last December the Portuguese authorities set up a 'transitional govern expelled from it two of the five representatives of the Movement for the