TNAG-1411-FCO40-1887-Future-of-Hong-Kong--Hong-Kong-a-Change-of-Destiny---despatc-1985 — Page 43

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24.

During the final stages of the negotiations there were two other vitally important tasks. The first was to hammer out with the Chinese the series of Annexes which would set out in detail those elements in Hong Kong society which were to be preserved, a task performed by, first, one working group led by Dr David Wilson of the Foreign Office, to which was added a second led by Mr Robin McLaren, Political Adviser to the Hong Kong Government, both working with increasing intensity as the September deadline approached. They were backed up by teams in Hong Kong working in the final stages right around the clock involving no less than 50 Heads of Departments and more than 150 Hong Kong Civil Servants working in co-operation with their London and Peking colleagues.

25. The Annexes themselves were detailed and masterpieces of drafting. They encapsulated the essentials of the society which is Hong Kong, including the equivalent of a Bill of Rights. That when published they met so effectively the requirements of the business community, professional classes and population in general, is a tribute to those who worked on them so intensively and conscientiously. Even so they would not have been enough in themselves to obtain the confidence of the Hong Kong community in the agreement. The Chinese were adamant throughout that what happened in Hong Kong after 1997 was a sovereign domestic matter for them. Hence the unusual form of the agreement which appears largely as a declaration of the policies of the Chinese Government. The difficulty was to show that this was more than a unilateral declaration which might be changed at will: it had to be made internationally binding on China. HMG therefore put forward a draft in which in response to an undertaking by the United Kingdom that it would restore Hong Kong to China with effect from 1 July 1997 the Chinese Government would undertake an internationally binding commitment to bring into force the autonomy and preservation of the essentials of Hong Kong's way of life promised in the agreement.

26. Chinese acceptance was not achieved without further drama. The Chinese drafts were designed to bind the British to surrender their authority over Hong Kong, but failed to include any corresponding obligation on the Chinese to respect the undertakings in the agreement. A second problem was that in the negotiations during the spring the Chinese insisted that there should be a Sino-British Joint Liaison Group in Hong Kong in the transitional period between the signing of the Declaration and 1997. This was strongly resisted by the Hong Kong Executive Council and caused much anxiety in the Hong Kong community generally. It was feared that this would result in a form of "creeping condominium". Resistance to the establishment of the Joint Liaison Group nearly brought the negotiations to the brink of collapse. It was only during an action-packed visit by you, sir, to Peking in early August, during which momentous, on-the-spot decisions were required, that the bargain was struck. The Chinese accepted provisions clearly indicating that the Joint Declaration would be a legally binding international agreement; that the Chinese policies recorded in the Declaration and all its Annexes would be incorporated in the future Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; and that the Joint Liaison Group would not be an organ of power nor would it play any part in the administration of Hong Kong or have any supervisory role over that administration. In return the United Kingdom accepted that the group could establish its main base in Hong Kong in July 1988. An announcement to this effect at the Secretary of State's press conference in Hong Kong on August 1 was reasonably well received: but Hong Kong still wished to see the full texts.

27.

These texts were initialled in Peking on 26 September and I flew back by specially chartered executive jet the same evening to present them to an historic meeting of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, broadcast live on television. The demand for copies of the agreement was so great that Government offices had to remain open all night to distribute them. (Eventually over 3 million copies were distributed in a few days.) To our intense relief, the press and media the following day confirmed that the agreement had been accepted by the public as a good one and far better than most people had hoped for.

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