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chronology of the period 15 April 5 July is attached to this despatch.
5.
in Peking, and its hunger strikes, stirred admiration in Hong Kong.
The student movement associated demonstrations and feelings of exhilaration and Large sums of money (probably between 1 and 2 million pounds) were collected for the students. From the start it was clear that the people of Hong Kong felt a much closer sense of personal involvement with what was happening in China than had been the case during previous political upheavals on the mainland, for example the Cultural Revolution. They also revealed a deep sense of national identity with their fellow Chinese in the PRC.
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There were various reasons for this:
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Because of the increased ease of travel between Hong Kong and the PRC, China is no longer the closed and forbidding country of even the 1970's, but rather a place to which many Hong Kong people go regularly to visit relatives, and where they have both friends and business interests;
The Sino-British Joint Declaration and the approach of 1997 have meant that the people Hong Kong now recognise that their future is with China: they therefore identify more closely with developments there;
The student movement itself struck a deep emotional chord, because of its historical antecedents and the particular status of students in Chinese culture;
The aims of the movement, imprecise though they were, coincided with the hopes that most Hong Kong people had of a China evolving in a more liberal direction. Naively perhaps, these hopes rose when the Chinese Government appeared to be powerless the face of mass demonstrations, only to be dashed dramatically by the subsequent brutal reimposition of Government control;
Finally, and of great significance, massive television coverage of the events in Peking for almost the whole of their duration produced an immediate and unforgettable visual impact.
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