9
FRIDAY, APRIL 2,
1993
5. As you can imagine, having endured a number of years in the House of Commons, hasn't meant that I'm super-sensitive to verbal abuse. I have been alightly surprised, but I guess I should recognise that what has been said about me in the past few months is as nothing compared to what has been said about some of the present leaders in China and in the past by other officials, go I'M IN
I don't honestly good company, perhaps I should say,
There is an think that abuse presses anybody very much. expression which football managers use about playing the man, rather than the ball, and I think people usually play the man rather than the ball when they haven't got better arguments. I would very much like to be able to engage in a constructive The fact that discussion and dialogue with Chinese officials.
I've been called names, when that dialogue begins, which I'm sure in due course it will, the fact that I've been called names won't have any effect on the way that I conduct such a dialogue. But, as you suggested, given that the House of Commons is so often like an annual meeting of the mother's union, I'm fairly used to I've been called a number of some of these slings and arrows. things in my time and I dare say that the thesaurus of abuse hasn't yet been closed.
6.
I think that when people talk about misunderstandings between us and China that perhaps the most important misunderstanding is about the nature and causes of Hong Kong's success, as I tried to argue earlier. Hong Kong, 1 repeat,
repeat, hasn't just been successful because it's applied capitalism. Adam Smith, who has been, if you like, sort of Hong Kong's patron saint, was a moral philosopher and he wasn't just writing about a capitalist structure, he was writing about a way of life of which such a structure was a part. When people make economic decisions for themselvas, they inevitably want to make other decisions, too, and there is plenty that I could say about the relationship between economics and political structure, but just to show how many of the diplomatic skills of judicious self-restraint I've learned, I'd better leave it at that. Except, to say this, first of all, while I don't believe that pluralist structures are a necessary precondition for economic growth, nor do I hold the view that pluralist political structures prevent economic growth, which is sometimes argued by one or two leaders in Asia. If that were the case, please explain on one side of a piece of paper, Japan and Germany. Secondly, I don't believe that there is a mechanistic relationship between economic growth and political change, but on the other hand, I'm sure that economic growth in
and Taiwan,
has South Korea,
elsewhere,
political consequences. It's not for me to assert what those political consequences should be, and it's not for me to predict what they might be in Asian countries or other countries, but I think all those things are pretty clear from our own experience.
in
/7. THE COMMUNITY
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