XN000022-1997-01-08 — Page 4

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Of course, everyone is in favour of responsible behaviour. It would be difficult to make a convincing speech in favour of irresponsibility. But I have to say that I have been in Hong Kong, now, getting on for five years over four and a half years - as some of you may have noticed, and I think Hong Kong is as responsible and moderate a place as I have ever lived in. I think it is arguably the case that there is a lot less extremism, politically, in Hong Kong than anywhere else that I have lived in my increasingly long life. So I don't think that anything in Hong Kong, any of Hong Kong's values, the espousal of those values, represents a threat to anybody else.

I don't want to pick an argument with anybody but I am not quite sure what the threat which Hong Kong is supposed to represent actually consists of. What we do have here in Hong Kong is a set of values which people hold dear, which have helped to make Hong Kong a decent and economically successful place. And what, I think, would concern everybody is any action which undermined or threatened those values and those principles. I think that is, clearly from the opinion polls and clearly from what I heard being expressed on radio phone-in programmes yesterday, that is what concerns people, not extremism directed at anybody else.

As for the press, well, I thought there was a very good speech made on freedom of the press on Monday night by the Chief Secretary, in which the Chief Secretary said what I am sure you all feel. That newspapers should report without fear or favour, responsibly, what needs to be reported in a free society. I would not have chosen to change a word in that speech, had I been sufficiently eloquent to make it myself, and I guess that most members of this free, open, pluralist, unthreatening community would feel exactly the same.

Question: I would like to ask you a subsidiary question. I asked Lord Howe, yesterday, what made him think that there were subversives in Hong Kong who were going to cause this kind of revolution and he said to me that this was Peking's view, that it was not something which he had sensed here but that this is what Peking was worried about, that there would be subversion.

Governor: I have said many times that I thought that Chinese leaders should trust Hong Kong and should relax about Hong Kong. One country, two systems, implies that that is what they should do. Hong Kong and its system is different from China and its system. Hong Kong, as I think the New York Times suggested the other day, is a reflection of the future in Asia. It is a decent, free, open society and will long remain that, and I don't think that should be regarded by anybody as a threat.

Question: Some provisional legislators, including Mr Leung Chun-ying who is the Vice Chairman of the Preparatory Committee, plainly mentioned yesterday that the provisional legislature is no longer a designate one...?

Governor: I cannot hear what you are saying, I'm sorry.