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Hong Kong has a wonderful reputation internationally. Every comparative measure of economic performance has us among the front runners. People admire our commercial vigour, our vitality, our self-confident resilience, our responsible exercise of freedom. And because they admire us so much, they inevitably ask "It's terrific today; but what will it be like after 1997?". And when they try to answer that question, which determines their confidence or otherwise, all the headlines made by some of the recent incidents I described crowd into their cuttings files or on to their computer screens.
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Do you answer those worries by pretending they don't exist, by claiming it does happen you know that issues like civil liberties don't matter to people in Hong Kong: don't matter to people many of whom are here precisely because of the civil liberties that we enjoy and others don't?
Give people answers that bear no resemblance to reality and they don't believe you. Politely, of course. But they don't believe you. They think you're in the propaganda business, not the truth game.
There are powerful arguments to put about Hong Kong's future. The momentum of our economic success. The sound foundation on which our commercial life is based. The strength, too, of our institutions - courts, civil service, professions, charities, and so on. Our position at the heart of Asia and at the gateway of China. Above all, the sheer quality of our people. Those are, I repeat, powerful arguments. Don't discredit them by pretending that we don't have some difficult problems - not of our own making to overcome as well.
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One issue that has bubbled to the surface again recently is the question of freedom of the press. You can bet your bottom dollar that we'll be asked for more reassurance about what things will be like after 1997 as a direct result. And note well - as it used to say in books on grammar - the fuss wasn't stirred up by anything said or done by the Hong Kong Government.
A free press is guaranteed, of course, by the Joint Declaration, and again by Article 27 of the Basic Law. The guarantee in Article 27 isn't qualified in any way by the application of national Chinese law. The only Chinese laws that will be applied in Hong Kong are mentioned in Article 18- and none of those listed touches on freedom of speech.