The initial breach in Hong Kong’s policy of cautious neutrality came on June 5, 1950, when two Nationalist warships, enforcing their own blockade against the Reds, attacked the 800-ton British merchant vessel _Cheung Hing_. This dreadnought, steaming along with a cargo of fertilizer from Amoy, was raked with Nationalist shells which killed six of her passengers and wounded six others. Early in August, 1950, the Reds produced their own series of incidents. Communist gunboats fired on three British ships just outside Hong Kong territorial waters and an armed Red junk bombarded the American freighter _Steel Rover_. The day after the _Rover_ incident, a Communist shore battery on Ling Ting Island, a few miles outside the southern limit of Hong Kong waters, directed its cannon and machine guns against the British freighter _Hangsang_, wounding two British officers. Communist forts in the same area fired on the Norwegian freighter _Pleasantville_ on August 6, but no hits were scored. The shootings were collectively interpreted as a Red warning to keep all Allied shipping away from her installations on Ling Ting and the nearby Lema and Ladrone islands. On August 17, the British destroyer _Concord_ replied to the warning by exchanging a half-hour of shellfire with the Communist forts. None of these incidents was as disruptive as the Communist agitation inside the colony. Here the core of the trouble arose from the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, or FTU, an openly pro-Red group with more than sixty member unions whose power was concentrated in shipyards, textile mills and public utilities. The FTU succeeded in fomenting a streetcar strike in 1949. With zealous devotion to the party line, the FTU unions shoved themselves into every labor dispute they could penetrate. They also displayed a touching concern for the unhappy living conditions of the refugees, undeterred by the fact that most of the refugees obviously preferred them to conditions in Communist China. A flash fire in a refugee settlement on November 21, 1951, drove 10,000 persons from their shacks and enabled Red China to rush in with the offer to send a relief mission. The Communist angels of mercy were to be met at the Hong Kong terminus of the Kowloon-Canton Railway by a banner-waving group of left-wing welcomers. They failed to show up, and a riot broke out in which there was one fatality and thirty injuries before police brought it under control.