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Governor's Q&A session at HK Business Conference in London
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Following is the transcript of the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's question-and-answer session after his speech at the Hong Kong Business Conference at Hilton Hotel in London today (Monday):
David Allan (Allwines Ltd): I am Managing Director of a company selling wine investment and we have a lot of customers in Hong Kong. Nobody so far has mentioned the word "communism", and the Chinese are still probably the only communist state in the world that still advocates the system. On that basis, how do you trust the guarantees that they make if they still wish to present the face of communism as a workable system to the world?
Governor: To be fair, the Chinese do not often mention communism; they mention a socialism and perhaps some would believe practised what I heard happily described as "market Leninism"! The real guarantee, and I do not deny that it is uniquely difficult almost to carry through, is one country/two systems. We have had some examples in world history of one country/two systems as a concept working. If there are any Scots present today, and usually when you talk about Hong Kong there are Scots present, think you could argue that the Act of Union between England and Scotland had been a successful example of one country/two systems. Any Germans present might not regard what had happened in Germany at the end of the War as a successful example of one country/two systems. So you can think of examples of it working and examples of it not working. What it requires is considerable sophistication and deftness of touch on the part of the Government in Peking, and it requires a degree of moderation and restraint on the part of the community in Hong Kong, which I believe they have shown again and again.
What has always to me been one of the most extraordinary features of political development in Hong Kong is how moderate our political dialogue is. If you compare the events through which Hong Kong has lived and consider the implications of 1997 with what happens elsewhere in the region, for me it is an astonishing fact and a very encouraging one that there is so little extremism in Hong Kong and in the political debate. Somebody perhaps not intending to be helpful said that they though the political argument in Hong Kong about social and economic policy ran from about me to Tony Blair, which gives you some idea of how extensive the argument is!