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Thirdly, it has been argued that there would be no more deals with China, that if we insisted on having clean elections we would never be able to do business with China again. It is implicit in that charge that before 1992, all had been sweetness and light in our negotiations and alas, that is not the case. Our negotiations with China have become almost completely bogged down after Tiananmen and it is certainly true that we have done more important business with China in the last couple of years than in any comparable period. Mind you, we need to because time is running short.
This summer saw important agreements on financing the construction of our new airport and the transition through 1997 of our judiciary and the administration of justice. We had our successful elections in September, followed a few weeks later by the equally successful visit of the Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr Qian Qichen, to London, with more agreements, principally on the transition of our civil service and the relationship between the present government of Hong Kong and its successor.
The real message is that, contrary to expert predictions, we have been able to hold democratic elections, we have been able to stand up for Hong Kong and for the promises that Hong Kong people should be allowed to run Hong Kong while doing a significant amount of business with China too. The closer we get to 1997, I am sure that the more Chinese officials will recognise that Hong Kong and China will suffer if too many issues remain unresolved at the moment of transfer of sovereignty.
The fourth charge made is that no-one in Hong Kong is really interested in democracy. I think it is a patronising, even racist charge that Hong Kong people are only interested in making money. People in Hong Kong are no more interested in politics and democracy than people anywhere else, but if you ask them whether they want more or less say in determining their own affairs, not surprisingly they say more. They are increasingly well educated and well travelled as I argued earlier. They run all the institutions of civil society. It is hardly surprising that they want to share in representative government like similar men and women elsewhere.
Are these critics anyway saying that we, Britain and China, were wrong to offer step by step democracy ten years ago? Sometimes the argument seems to be not that we were wrong to offer this, but we were wrong to insist that any elections that were held must be fair elections.
I remember one of my critics saying that the problem was not that the Chinese officials wanted to fix elections, but they just wanted to know the results in advance!
The last charge is that if Chinese officials are determined to wind up the Legislative Council after 1997, if they are determined to amend our Bill of Rights and the other measures we have taken to protect human rights, why bother to do any of these things? Will there not be less democracy and less protection of human rights