XN000022-1996-06-27 — Page 4

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It is absolutely essential that people don't connive at the destruction of the things that make Hong Kong so special and make Hong Kong so successful. It's therefore imperative that people, as I mentioned earlier, stand up for that high degree of autonomy which Hong Kong was promised and stand up for the rule of law which is the spinal cord in Hong Kong's system. You don't have to explain what the rule of law means to people out there. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the people who live in Hong Kong, refugees or the family of refugees, are here because of the rule of law. They're here because of the difference between rules and laws on the one hand and the rule of law on the other.

Now those messages can come best and most effectively from those whom China asks to advise it. I think one of the sadnesses is that the understandable difficulties of comprehension, which I think some Chinese officials have when it comes to the nature of a free society, but they're not helped through those problems by the sort of advice that they sometimes get from Hong Kong. Advice about the importance of a politically neutral civil service, advice about the importance of an independent judiciary and the rule of law. Advice, for instance, that if you're serious about Hong Kong people running Hong Kong, what better way of putting muscle on the pledge than to have a step by step process of democratisation as we've been attempting under the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law.

Back in the early 80's when Britain and China first started to discuss the handover in 1997, Chinese officials originally wanted a rather vestigial, a rather skeleton treaty. A slim document which would just spell out the essentials. It was people in Hong Kong, leaders of the community in Hong Kong, leaders of the business community in Hong Kong who insisted that everything had to be spelt out. That they wanted written into that treaty the most detailed description of Hong Kong and the guarantees that were made for its future. Their voice was heard then and I think their voice could still be heard now whenever it happened to be raised.

What will the rest of the world do after 1997? I hope that it will watch Hong Kong continue to thrive and prosper but clearly for, for example, the United States there is a continuing interest, not just a commercial, an economic interest, there's a continuing interest in seeing Hong Kong survive as the sort of society which the United States should want to see right across Asia. Open markets, open minds, rule of law, political stability. I don't think that after 1997, the rest of the world is going to stop taking an interest in Hong Kong as a great international city. Quite the reverse.