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The Implementation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration
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that officials working behind the scenes unilaterally modified a ban on sales without informing Parliament. There is a remarkable similarity between those events and the introduction of the "convergence" policy in 1985.
The parallel opens up a rich lode for speculation, particularly over the peremptory removal of Lord Wilson as Governor and his replacement by a politician, Chris Patten, who immediately reversed British tactics in dealing with the Beijing government on implementing the political provisions of the Joint Declaration. There has to be a very high probability that by 1991 the British Cabinet had come to realize that the decline in the authority of the Hong Kong government and the steadily mounting tension in local: politics had come about because unsound advice had been fed to ministers by a small circle of career diplomats occupying key posts in Whitehall, Beijing and Hong Kong. It would seem that the nub of that unsound advice was that it made no sense to run the risk of invoking the wrath of Beijing by resisting its demands to set the agenda for political reform in Hong Kong in the transitional period because, in the end, not letting China have its way would make it worse for the people of Hong Kong.
So Wrong So Long
What is so extraordinary about the implementation of the Joint Declaration is not that it began to go wrong almost from the outset but that it was allowed to go on going wrong for seven years, or almost two-thirds of the transitional period, before a decision was made at cabinet level to try to put things right. Unfortunately, unlike the events leading up to the signing of the Joint Declaration, which are admirably chronicled in Robert Cottrell's The End of Hong Kong, there is no reliable account in the public domain of the inside story of the implementation. Nor is an objective account likely to be forthcoming in the near future, for those responsible for such an inglorious episode in British history will not be raring to go public ca their performance, except in self-serving personal memoirs.
The February 1984 Protocol
Nonetheless, Cottrell's book, which was warmly commended for "broad accuracy" by Sir Percy Cradock, Mrs. Thatcher's former éminence grise of the Sino-British interface, has a useful account of the origins of the JLG which helps to throw light on how the "convergence" policy came to be thrust on the British side in late 1985. He reports on page 143 et seq., that
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