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investors would not be affected. Such vague assurances did little to assure the population. For most of them the issue was not only investment, but whether their life-style would continue for them and their children after 1997, or whether they would be incorporated into a Communist state. In the face of such anxieties there was little point in telling them to set their hearts at ease.
10. The land lease proposal was put to the Chinese more formally in July of that year. In September, the Chinese Government formally rejected it as "unnecessary and inappropriate". This indicated that it would be difficult to blur the deadline of 1997: the Chinese would either have to acquiesce in British administration continuing beyond it or they would insist on a significant measure of change. Either way, the problem could not be dealt with by sleight of hand.
11. By the spring of 1982, the Unofficial Members of the Executive and Legislative Councils were beginning to seek a voice in the future. At the ceremony at which I was sworn in on 20 May that year the Senior Unofficial of the Executive Council sought confirmation that I would recognise the future as the most important issue then facing Hong Kong. There was also a growing expectation, and indeed a demand, that the issue should be addressed during the Prime Minister's visit to Peking scheduled for September.
12.
There was no doubt at all about what the population of Hong Kong most wanted. It was the continuation of British administration and of the link with the United Kingdom. This was not because they relished colonial rule; national feeling runs deep even in Hong Kong. It was because the link with Britain, a liberal democracy, provides for them the guarantee of similar freedom under the law in Hong Kong. Thus they saw British administration as an “insulation" between them and Communist rule. For their part the Chinese were active in spreading knowledge of their intention to recover sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997 with Hong Kong given a special status within China which would allow the essentials of the Hong Kong system to remain. The lack of any precision in this "plan" and of any assurance that it would be binding on future Chinese Governments gave it little credence in the eyes of the Hong Kong public. They knew, as much by instinct as by analysis, that generalised declarations of China's good intent were not an adequate substitute for the link of authority with Britain. The people of Hong Kong attached little importance to the formal notions of sovereignty. They were prepared to see HMG recognise Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong (and indeed as Chinese sympathised with the Chinese position on sovereignty) provided that that recognition could be exchanged for a continuation of British administration.
13. The pursuit of that objective had to be HMG's first aim. The likelihood of the Chinese accepting it was not high: but they had acquiesced in British administration since 1949. Although they had stressed that recognition of Chinese sovereignty was essential to any settlement, to this point they had not said in terms that severeignty and administration were indivisable. In any case no other solution would have been accepted in Hong Kong until that possibility had been tested to its absolute limit.
14. A substantial number of papers on how Hong Kong worked and the importance of the British connection were accordingly prepared and presented to the Chinese over a long series of meetings. The aim was to educate the Chinese in the realities of how Hong Kong worked. It was also to draw the Chinese towards an arrangement under which, if they would accept the continuation of British administration for some unspecified period after 1997, HMG would concede that formal sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong should revert to China. In this way some account would have been taken of the strong national feelings in China that Hong Kong was Chinese territory while at the same time the Hong Kong Chinese would have been assured of the continuation of the system of government and law and the kind of economy to which they attached so much importance. The presentation of this case made little impact on the Chinese negotiators. They were adamant that the continuation of the British link after 1997 would not be acceptable to China and they would not
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