Britain faces two sets of separate but related dilemmas in determining policy towards China the first concerns the negotiations over Hong Kong and the second involves potentially conflicting interests in dealing with China.
Hong Kong:
Britain's immediate objective is to transfer the sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China under conditions that will enable the territory to continue its way of life through practising a high degree of autonomy as envisaged in the 1984 Joint Declaration. It is generally agreed that this can be best achieved through ensuring that the rule of law can be sustained through an independent judiciary and through a genuinely representative legislature in which the rule of law can be embedded.
The dilemma arises from choosing the best means to bring that about. One way is seek an agreement acceptable to the Chinese authorities. In this view the Chinese would be bound by their own signatures to an agreement between two sovereign states. They would be more likely to honour the obligations incurred and they could then be held accountable. Moreover the alternative would be no agreement by 1997 by which time the Chinese would be free to pursue their own preferred course which would no doubt be far more restrictive than what would have been possible to have been achieved through Sino-British negotiations. In this view any democratic advances that may be made in Hong Kong prior to 1997 would be immediately nullified by unilateral Chinese action. The problem with this view is that
that were the British side to make the concessions the Chinese are currently thought to demand little would remain of the Patten proposals and the territory would face a future in which the structures of governance would be substantially subject to control by the PRC. In other words if the Chinese side were unwilling to concede on key points in the Patten proposals any agreement would wittingly or otherwise contribute to the undermining of the "high degree of autonomy" for Hong Kong to which both sides were pledged by the Joint Declaration. It would also have the effect of further and rapidly eroding the diminishing authority of the British Hong Kong government in the lead up to 1997.
The alternative path is to hold onto the minimum conditions thought necessary for establishing a basis on which the people of Hong Kong would have a chance to practice that "high degree of autonomy "after 1997. In this view it is possible even within the framework of the letter of the Basic Law to develop an electoral system that is not rigged in advance so as to establish a sufficiently independent and representative legislature in which the rule of law can be embedded. Obviously it is highly desirable to obtain Chinese agreement through negotiations. It may even be that the only way to elicit such an agreement is to demonstrate the determination to proceed regardless of whether or not an agreement is reached. There can be no doubt that this is a high risk strategy as the Chinese authorities could overturn
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