TNAG-1390-FCO40-1862-Future-of-Hong-Kong-briefing-for-meetings-and-visits-1985 — Page 138

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Resignation, tinged with either optimism or pessimism

I put most of the comments I heard into this category.

A common reaction was along the lines that it is inevitable that China will re-establish sovereignty over the New Territories and Hong Kong by 1997 at the latest. The Sino-British Agreement is merely a recognition of this fact. The optimistic response went on to affirm, along with the inevitability, that the British had negotiated energetically on behalf of the people of Hong Kong.

Another common response was that the terms of the Agreement are very good;

The indeed they are so good as to be almost too good to be true. optimists accept this, but go on to say that there are no sufficient

Had Britain been reasons for doubting the good faith of the Chinese. confronted with a denial of territorial integrity in the same way as China has been confronted with Hong Kong since 1949, it is very doubtful whether China does Britain would have waited and negotiated in the way China has. take seriously its place in the world, and the role of international negotiations.

Another response indicated that the majority of christians are commiting themselves neither to an opinion about the Agreement nor to an engagement

The unwillingness to do so springs from with what will happen after 1997.

two considerations.

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The first of these is that China has seen so many policy changes over the past 12 to 15 years as to give rise to the supposition that there will be What was being doubted, therefore, was further changes even before 1997. not the good faith of the Chinese negotiators, but their capacity to control events. This uncertainty is compounded by the awareness that most of the present Chinese leadership will not be alive in 1997, and their successors may not share their attitude towards Hong Kong.

Although the Chinese A second consideration is more ideological. Communist Party is ready at the present time to work with other democratic parties, ethnic minorities and religious organisations in a United Front, it should not be assumed that the Communists are committed to a pluralist form of society. For the time being, the major contradiction in Chinese

If the best way to society is the slow pace of economic development. combat that contradiction is through a United Front, that is a price the

However, the basic contradiction in Marxist Communist Party will pay. ideology is still the class struggle and if this basic contradiction once again becomes the major contradiction, it is difficult to see how the

Optimists policy of one nation and two economic systems can be sustained. hold the opinion that the coexistence of the two systems within the one nation will lead to a general rise in the standard of living which will

To my mind, that optimism assumes that make the class struggle obsolete. capitalism, and capitalism in its Hong Kong form, is able to remove gross inequalities in society, but I would have thought that is something which is yet to be demonstrated.

In broad terms it was suggested to me that the pessimists are people born. in China who have experienced persecution and suffering, who have already felt so strongly their rejection of Communist rule that they have uprooted

The optimists are themselves at least once in their own life times. people born in Hong Kong who have never known persecution, who have imbibed some of the liberal presuppositions of Hong Kong's system, who have been aware of themselves as colonised without being a colony, who have built up resentments about the privileged treatment extended to expatriates, especially the British, who have felt betrayed by the British

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