the casualties of a disastrous high-wire act.
There could be other ameliorating factors.
Despite the political rift, practical co-operation over
large public works for the benefit of the future Special
Administrative Region may still continue. Certainly it
should be the object of both sides to ensure that it does;
and the Chinese dogma that politics is always in command
should not be allowed to stand in the way.
Above all, in a manner quite different from the
battles of the 1980s, the Hong Kong economy has so
shrugged off the crisis and led a buoyant life of its own,
relying on the territory's close ties with southern China
and the mainland's remarkable economic growth. This does
not make the political strains relevant, as some now
assert: challenges and struggles of the order we are now
experiencing will leave their mark, however they are
concluded. But it does offer the hope that, in the longer
term, against the immense fact of China's and, in
consequence, Hong Kong's prosperity, the constitutional
disputes of these times will dwindle in importance and be
eventually relegated to a secondary place in history.
Whatever the outcome, looking back, I do not
believe that British policy in the years covered by these
memoirs, that is from 1979 to 1992, can be seriously
faulted. Of course, it would have been better if, with
Peking's agreement, democracy could have been long rooted
in Hong Kong. It might have assuaged some guilt, though it
would have created many new problems, if the right to
settle in Britain had survived. But already we are well