ent
FENARO 30ARSION
Way,
་་
6/1
Your editorial "Maggie's Honor" (Wall Street Journal
24 January) claimed that Britain imposed the 1984 Sino
British Joint Declaration on the people of Hong Kong without
their consent and was now violating it. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
(15
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Six years ago Hong Kong faced an uncertain political future. The nineteenth century lease by which Britain held
virtually all the territory of Hong Kong was due to expire
in 1997, whereupon
in the absence of other arrangements
the place would simply have reverted to the world's largest communist society. Few people imagined then that Britain
would manage to secure arrangements for Hong Kong to continue to exist beyond 1997 as a distinct, capitalist, free enterprise society with its laws and liberties intact.
And Hong Kong's poor economic performance reflected that
lack of confidence.
:
When the draft of the Joint Declaration was published
in September 1984 it was greeted in Hong Kong, and
elsewhere, as the remarkable achievement it was. China had
agreed to an international agreement guaranteeing that
communism would not be imposed on Hong Kong after 1997, that Hong Kong people would govern themselves and that Hong Kong's way of life its freedoms, its international
connexions, its stock markets, its foreign investments
would carry on as before.
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The Joint Declaration was signed after it had been
widely endorsed by the Hong Kong people as the best
negotiable deal for Hong Kong, not imposed without their
consent. And far from being "relegated to history", as your
editorial charged, it is the basis of every agenda item in