XN000022-1993-04-02 — Page 4

FRIDAY, APRIL 2, 1993

between Britain and China,

launched launched at the United Nations, guaranteeing Hong Kong's way of life for 50 years after 1997.

I think that it's apparent to most of us that not only does Hong Kong's economic prosperity sustain its way of life, but that its way of life helps it to sustain its economic prosperity and its stability. The discussion, I will use а word which is appropriate I think for the language used by the Hong Kong government, the discussion going on between Britain and China and the Hong Kong community at the moment, is about how we can best implement the joint declaration, and, to come to specifics, its about how we can secure a credible Legislative Council as part of the essential framework for Hong Kong, as I have described. I'm not, I must apologise to some of you, attempting some great step forward towards democracy. I don't deserve some of the headlines which are sometimes given me in the press outside Hong Kong. What we're attempting to do is to provide arrangements for clean and fair elections in 95. Believing that it's important to the rule of law in Hong Kong that there should be a broadly- based, and, to repeat myself, a credible Legislative Council.

Hong Kong is, to that extent, totally different from the other dependent territories for which Britain has on the whole been responsible. There, we have been preparing communities for independence. We've done so by providing them with Westminster or Washington-style democracy, Canadian-style democracy, with the rule of law, independent courts, and with a clean and honest bureaucracy. And wa've put those ingredients on the launch pad, we've lit the touch paper, and hoped that the satellite would blast off into independent orbit. That isn't the situation, that isn't the problem or challenge that we face in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, we've been preparing a community for the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997. And that has affected, among other things, the whole question of democratisation. I don't think that anybody would seek to argue that we've been in a situation in which China has been pressing us to go faster with democratisation and we as the sovereign power have been denying that rapid growth. I put the point very delicately and very diplomatically, But I am pleased that within the last decade, we have reached an agreement with China about the increasing democratisation of Hong Kong. There's no dispute about the pace of that democratisation. There is an argument now, a discussion now,

about the precise way in which the quasi-democratio Legislative Council should be elected in 1995.

Ne put forward, last October, proposals for those 1995 elections and they were proposals. They weren't a fait accompli, they weren't decisions made by the British government on behalf of the people of Hong Kong, they were proposals that we put forward, on the basis of wide-ranging discussions with political and community leaders in Hong Kong. And, we put them forward for discussion. When I want to Peking in October, I stressed that we would like to discuss those matters with Chinese officials, and when I left Peking, the proposal was that we should some forum with meeting between Foreign Ministers of the Joint Liaison Group, which deals with day-to-day diplomatic matters between China, Britain, and Hong Kong, that we should use some other forum for continuing the discussions. However, the Chinese

/POSITION THEN