I just don't see it playing out OP's way at all. Events would rapidly turn it to something very different and dangerous.
In wondering how, I end up with only lots of unanswerable questions. Cut half our presence in Germany so soon after the Airlift? Cut the naval and air shadowing of Moscow? Move a couple of carrier groups to HK? What;s the USSR going to do in response in Europe? How to work the nuclear threat? Polaris didn't arrive until the end of the 60s. So move all our 50s nuclear deterrent, which was only ready mid to late 50s, to Malaya with then Communist inclined rebels maybe? I think Victors, Vulcans and Canberras needed more runway than Kai Tak then had. They weren't carrier capable. So where you going to put them? Taiwan? Except Taiwan was predicted at risk of falling through the 50s, which is why US military support didn't come until the end of the decade. Besides, that starts to look like the West mobilising for WW3. A robust response becomes more and more likely.
OK I can't make this novel's plot work. :)
A HK airlift would be logistically challenging to say the least, and I don't believe it would have had similar chance of being successful. Look at Kai Tak, and its famously awkward mountain avoiding approach back in the 1950s. Berlin was universally acknowledged as strategically important in the newly hatched Cold War. The East and West had been nose to nose militarily in Germany since 45. Berlin was served by multiple source airfields, several air corridors and flying boats onto the lakes. HK would probably have had to be entirely sourced from Taiwan.
Yet Berlin succeeded as much from the counter blockade, that actually turned out to be surprisingly damaging to the East, as the huge scale of the sustained air lift. I can't picture a HK airlift around the same era as being nearly as successful.