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I think the whole community has been shocked by what happened this week. Some may not have been surprised but I think most have been shocked. A group of legislators, carrying a petition and more important, carrying what I understand to be perfectly valid travel documents were stopped from entering China, their country after 1997, and had their travel documents removed. I'm not quite sure under what law or under what regulation. I'm sure that there would be a local and international outcry if the Government in Hong Kong was simply to take away peoples' travel documents in a similar way. It would be intolerable because we have the rule of law in Hong Kong. It's the spine of our system.
So we, I think understandably, expressed our concern to the New China News Agency and asked what the reason for this course of action was and I think the New China News Agency declined to add to the comments made by officials in Peking that this was because the Legislators in question or may be the petition in question represented some sort of threat to state security. Now sometimes I disagree with honourable members, but I've never thought of them as being terribly threatening and we know perfectly well that other people have carried petitions to Peking before and have been very courteously received, even when officials haven't agreed with the terms of the petition. We know that Greenpeace protesters, none of them I think about to become Chinese citizens, recently had their petition accepted perfectly courteously by Chinese officials. So I do think this was most unfortunate and I think that inevitably it had a rather bad taste on a day when people were thinking about what lies ahead in a year's time. It's another example of confidence being disturbed, not by the present Government, not by the British Government, but by Chinese officials.
Now I always think that it's better to talk to people rather than to anathematise them. I. came back from a visit to the United States recently and was greeted by a crowd of friends of the New China News Agency, gathered in from the highways and byways of Mong Kok, to salute my re-emergence in Hong Kong society. I didn't regard that as being threatening, I regarded it as being, even though I disagreed with what they were saying, one of the aspects of living in a free and open society. And I do think it would be better for China's reputation internationally and better for China's image as we approach the transition in Hong Kong for Chinese officials to talk to people, even when they disagree with them rather than try to reject their views out of hand.
Nothing is going to change the fact that the majority of public pinion in Hong Kong supports the continuance of a free, open, democratic society and that isn't going to be changed by the calendar and it's not going to be changed by taking away people's valid travel documents.