Police arrest 14 illegal emigrants on March 7, 2008 in Nanlang county, Zhongshan, a Guangdong Province prefecture-level city. Photo: CFP

By Li Xiaoshu

On a dark November night in 1974, Lü Zhaonian dived into deep and dirty Dapeng Bay and began swimming the four long and deathly kilometers to Hong Kong from the fishing village of Shenzhen.

All went smooth until a People's Republic speedboat spotted him and turned their high beams in his direction.

Lü stretched out four limbs, playing a dead floater on the icy seawater.

"Their brief inspection felt like an eternity," says Lü, now 55. "I held my breath and gritted my teeth … shivering badly in the biting chill of the waves."

Minutes later, he said he overheard "That guy can't survive there. Let's go!"

His right arm and legs had already cramped and so in a life-and-death struggle, Lü churned through the water using all his strength, a single arm and hand rotating his body almost like a propeller through the water.

The moment he reached shore, Lü passed out.

"It was the morning sun that awoke me to a whole new world," Lü says, smiling.

Lü's is just one small but typical story from the mass exodus of Communist citizens seeking a better life in the capitalist harbor, a story too officially sensitive to recount until 2005 when mainland authorities first began to relent on secrecy.

Some 560,000 residents from 62 cities and counties in 12 different provinces on the Chinese mainland flooded to Hong Kong as illegal immigrants between 1949 and 1974, according to some 12,000 documents released by the Guangdong Provincial Archives Bureau on April 1, 2007.

The real figure is two or three times higher, disclosed writer Chen Bing'an who spent 22 years interviewing refugees and published The Great Exodus to Hong Kong on August 20.

Yet even accepting the official figures, they compare unfavorably with 5,043 East Germans climbing the Berlin Wall or tens of thousands of North Koreans crossing the Yalu River to the prefecture-level Chinese city of Dandong.

"The outcry from people who left their homeland at the cost of life and blood awakened Chinese authorities at the crossroads," Chen says, "and ultimately forged the country's opening-up.

"Without the struggle, China's top reformers wouldn't have realized where to test the socialist market economy.

"It was illegal immigration that built Hong Kong into what it is and cultivated Shenzhen as the nation's pilot economic zone."

For years, the daily corpses that drifted onto the seashore with the tides disturbed 61-year-old Liang Xian, an expert in corporate development strategy.

Probable refugees from the Chinese mainland live in shabby shelters in Hong Kong in 1962. Photo: CFP

Liang in 1979 was dispatched to develop the industrial zone of Shekou, an enclave on the water-front 3.5 nautical miles northwest of Yuen Long in Hong Kong, shortest of three popular escape routes.

His first job at the zone was to help officials bury the bodies of the countless people who had failed to make it.

"It was dangerous and fatal," says Liang, eyes glittering with tears. "Death seemed too easy. Human lives were as trivial as ants."

The more resourceful worked out ways of boosting their chances.

Writer Liang Zhaosong has friends who made it. "Many used tires and foam," he says. "More creatively, they inflated condoms or strung together hundreds of pingpong balls."

Wu Junjie, former director of the Guangdong Provincial Publicity Department, remembers migrants carried tiger dung to repel guard dogs.

"Those who wanted to avoid surveillance sometimes put watermelon rinds on their head like a mask, leaving only two holes for the eyes."

Most refugees were young and strong male peasants, leaving behind the old, under-age and physically vulnerable groups in deserted villages, according to a 1971 report by the public security bureau of Bao'an county, cradle of Shenzhen.

Others included city dwellers, students, educated youth, workers, soldiers and officials. Many were Communist Party members.

"They looked like an army, hand in hand, shoulder by shoulder, some armed with wooden sticks," says 79-year-old Fang Bao, former secretary of the county party committee of Dongguan.

The year 1962 marked the peak in illegal emigration to Hong Kong as the mainland suffered the Great Chinese Famine: officially estimated to have caused 15 million deaths from starvation according to the Report of the Damage Caused by Disasters in China (1949-1995) released by the National Bureau of Statistics in January 1996. Unofficial estimates are much larger, with unconfirmed reports of cannibalism outbreaks in South China.

From 1958-1961, crop production fell 28.25 percent, according to the 1984 China Statistical Yearbook while the birth rate dropped 30 percent from 2.9 percent in 1958 to 2.1 percent in 1961.

Any capitalism in the countryside was a strict no no back then, according to a regulation approved by Bao'an county officials in 1957.

"Oil, meat and vegetables were scarce," Fang says. "All people ate were straw, papaya rind, sweet potato vine or even white clay."

At the same time as hundreds of millions of Chinese were starving under disastrous economic management, Hong Kong was embracing a booming manufacturing industry with a rising demand for workers. This hungry army of peasants satisfied a rising city's appetite for cheap labor.

70 times richer

Residents of the flourishing city averaged earnings of 13,000 Hong Kong dollars annually, 70 times more than their desperate peers on the other bank of the 20-meter-wide Shenzhen River that not only geo-graphically divided two regions but also two imbalanced economic and political systems.

Fang can't forget that chaos four decades ago, including the occasional sound of gunshots before 1960.

Since late April 1962, some 5,000 refugees choked up the border crossing every evening for three months.

"They stamped down the barbed wire at the border and forcibly marched on to their 'paradise,'" Fang says. "Strong cries of 'Go, go, go!' could be clearly heard."

Some 83 percent of the more than 60,000 people who fled to Hong Kong in 1962 were repatriated and kept in detention centers, according to a file released by the Shenzhen government in December 2005.

Both governments sometimes tacitly turned an official blind eye to "state betrayal" and "illegal immigration."

"They were all good people physically and spiritually tortured in the middle of a crisis," Zhang Xunfu, former Party secretary of the Shenzhen Communist Party of China (CPC) Committee, was quoted by Phoenix TV as saying.

Class struggle soon returned to trigger another exodus of educated youth, college students, intellectuals, artists and liberal officials to the relative freedom of a colonial land.

Known as China's "godfather to futures," educated youth Liu Mengxiong arrived in Hong Kong with nothing but a pair of swimming trunks on September 23, 1974 after six days' hiding in the mountains and a nine-hour swim.

Son of an alleged rightist labeled during campaigns to purge people who favored capitalism in 1957, Liu was on a gray list even after being honored as a model worker in 1969.

Then in 1970 he overheard his village chief in Dongguan saying "people with a bad family background should only ever be used rather than trusted."

A disillusioned Liu decided to flee.

"Five lighthouses at the distant destination shone over me like red stars," recalls the 62-year-old.

"During swimming, I encouraged myself with quotations from Chairman Mao that 'a man should be determined, fearless and fight against all odds.'"

"In an age of Communist fanaticism, the capitalist world became a resourceful pool for energetic and skillful fishermen like me who were choking on political suppression."

Runaways like Liu forged the backbone of the new middle class in Hong Kong, although few forgot their humble, oppressed origins.

"This group has helped Hong Kong grow into the most diversified, advanced, open and civil city on the Pearl-River delta," says Zhou Yongxin, a sociologist at the University of Hong Kong.

"A negative effect was the unhealed psychological wound and thorny collective memory stirring incurable skepticism and fear among the illegal immigrants against the mainland government."

What made Hong Kong so much better? How to handle escapees? These were tough, embarrassing questions for top mainland officials.

Hollow rhetoric

According to the official document Hong Kong - Hell on Earth distributed among Communist Party members in the 1950s, the British colony was:

the world's most licentious city;

controlled by underground forces;

the largest base for drug production and trafficking; and,

had high suicide rates

The People's Daily in 1962 sent veteran reporter Li Zhuang to investigate these horrors behind the colonial curtain.

Li followed the route of illegal immigrants to Hong Kong, but was immediately impressed by work-ing lives filled with momentum: a completely contradictory picture to the headstrong condemnations.

An astonished Li sent four comprehensive reports for internal reference to high-ranking officials, calling on the authorities to "rethink history, adjust policy and learn a lesson."

Even before Li's advice, officials in Shenzhen had been carrying out under-the-table policies since August 1961 that encouraged border trade, an embryonic form of opening-up.

Their experiment went on quietly for decades until Deng Xiaoping,paid his legendary visits to Shenzhen in November 1977.

When officials raised the illegal emigration problem to Deng, the old man sat silent a while and smoked several cigarettes, according to History Reference, a People's Daily magazine.

"This problem can't be solved by military measures," Deng was quoted as saying. "The key is to improve people's lives."

Lesson finally learned

After that, Communist revolutionary Xi Zhongxun took charge of Guangdong Province in 1978 and carried out a careful field study in Shenzhen.

Fang Bao, then deputy secretary of the Shenzhen CPC committee, urged Xi that same year to approve special export zones in 14 communes along the border.

When the policy was officially announced on March 6, 1979, locals cheered and celebrated the upheaval.

The next year, Guangdong provincial government leaders proposed setting up a special economic zone to Deng, finally established on August 26, 1980.

City officials encouraged locals to use 267 hectares of farmland and export agricultural products across the border to Hong Kong.

"I couldn't even believe my eyes," says Wu Nansheng, first party secretary of the CPC committee of Shenzhen, "All those escapees who had once been hiding in the woods and behind rocks disappeared."

The next marked decline in illegal emigration came after Hong Kong returned to the Chinese mainland in 1997 and has continued ever since.

By 2009, some 2,028 illegal migrants from the mainland were arrested and repatriated, a 17.5 percent drop from 2,460 in 2008, according to the Immigration Department of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Hong Kong residents now come to the mainland looking for better economic opportunities: By June 30, 40,000 Hong Kong residents had settled on the mainland, for the first time in history exceeding the official number of mainlanders permanently resident in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong border continues its invaluable role as an economic, civil and political barometer that pierces through decades of official publicity and rhetoric, believes Liang Mantao.

"The concept of the Shenzhen- Hong Kong border has been challenged, consolidated and gradually blurred, but its history can't be erased," he says.

Brave swimmer Lü Zhaonian eventually made his fortune as a factory owner in Hong Kong but then lost everything to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

He finally returned to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province in 2004 to become a fortune teller.

"People can neither change history or fate," Lü says. "The only thing we probably should do is to accept and review them from different perspectives from time to time."