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It would scarcely be a diplomatic triumph but, to my mind, it
is likely to be the least bad of the courses that may eventually
confront us.
Conclusion
If
24. I am conscious that the above is a bleak analysis, but this
is a subject on which there are emphatically no easy answers.
it is any comfort, I should add that I do not know of any other
strategy, or stratagem, we could have adopted that would have
brought us to a substantially different situation. Given the lease
and the terminal date of 1997, the Macao option of doing nothing
about Hong Kong was never practicable. When we began to broach
the issue in 1979, we lost some tricks through failure to open a
dialogue with the Chinese at the time when their ideas were taking
shape. Later, when negotiations began, our long fight for British
administration may well have hardened the Chinese stand over the
employment of UK personnel after 1997. But I doubt whether
fundamentals have been affected. There was one idea evolved in
early 1983, that we should renounce the three treaties, thereby
removing the terminus ad quem of the New Territories Lease and
depending entirely on Chinese tolerance rather like Macao. It is
just possible that had this been tried, not in 1982 but in 1979,
it would have produced a different outcome. But one has only to
outline such a proposal to recognise its political impracticability:
it would have meant abandoning without having tried them a whole
series of what at the time seemed defensible positions and flinging
ourselves entirely on Chinese mercies. So that there has been a
kind of fatality about the negotiations: given the historical
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18.