Then & Now | What sparked Hong Kong’s Double Tenth riots

SIxty years ago this week, northern Kowloon was convulsed by deadly political violence.

Following the Communist takeover in 1949, China had two national holidays. October 1 became celebrated as the foundation date of the People’s Republic and is observed in Hong Kong as National Day. October 10 – popularly known as Double Tenth – is the anniversary of the 1911 Wuchang uprising, which led to the establishment of the Chinese republic, in 1912. This event continues to be com­memorated by Nationalist supporters – and in Taiwan. Large-scale public displays of Nationalist flags for Double Tenth were last seen in Hong Kong in 1996, several months before the handover, while low-key celebrations still occur in various places.

The Star Ferry disturbances in 1966, and the Communist-fomented riots that shook the colony for several dangerous months in 1967, are widely evoked in today’s popular memory. Less remembered is the serious unrest that rocked Hong Kong – or more specifically, parts of northern Kowloon – in October 1956. Known as the Double Tenth riots, in reference to the date they broke out, these were provoked by a paid network of Nationalist agents provocateurs and catalysed bitter political tensions that had crossed over from China during the civil war in the late 1940s, and steadily grew in Hong Kong from the early 50s.

In the years that followed the Commu­nist takeover on the mainland in 1949, Hong Kong’s main internal security threat came from the ousted Nationalist regime, by then driven into exile on Formosa (Taiwan). Nationalist-affiliated criminal gangs had flooded into Hong Kong when the Communist victory became apparently inevitable. Vehemently anti-Communist – the new broom on the mainland having swept them from their extortion grounds, with numerous triad members executed – opportunistic involvement by gangs in political violence was predictable.