The British, as in 1982, will seek to escape the
net of principle and concentrate on detail; but they will be
pressed for time and the larger concessions will no doubt be
expected from them. These will involve hard decisions,
balancing retreats from democracy as promised by the
Governor against the effects on Hong Kong of permanent
Therer will always be the option of
withdrawal from the talks and appeal to the Legislative
confrontation
•
Council; but such a break
would
probably prove
irretrievable; and the consequences would be so serious and
so unwelcome to Hong Kong, which remains after all the whole
object of the exercise, that it must be presumed that this
will remain the remoter contingency and that an eventual
agreement will be reached.
If an agreement is attained, it will no doubt be
argued by many on the British side that the results, however
small, were well worth the losses inflicted on Hong Kong
and on Sino-British relations in the course of the crisis,
indeed that the result could not have been obtained in any
other way. It may be claimed that only thus could honour be
satisfied and Hong Kong steeled in struggle. Others will
reply that the experience was a costly and unnecessary
lesson in reality; that there can be little honour in a
struggle to satisfy British amour propre at the expense of a
British colony; and that the same or better results could
have been secured more rapidly and at much less cost by
quiet discussion in the autumn of 1992. Most of these
assertions and counter-assertions will be unprovable. The
wise observer will shrug his shoulders at the theatre of
X
13