TNAG-1983-FCO40-2816-Presentation-of-UK-policy-on-Hong-Kong-to-the-media-1989 — Page 116

ent

FENARO 30ARSION

Way,

་་

6/1

Your editorial "Maggie's Honor" (Wall Street Journal

24 January) claimed that Britain imposed the 1984 Sino

British Joint Declaration on the people of Hong Kong without

their consent and was now violating it. Nothing could be

further from the truth.

(15

-

Six years ago Hong Kong faced an uncertain political future. The nineteenth century lease by which Britain held

virtually all the territory of Hong Kong was due to expire

in 1997, whereupon

in the absence of other arrangements

the place would simply have reverted to the world's largest communist society. Few people imagined then that Britain

would manage to secure arrangements for Hong Kong to continue to exist beyond 1997 as a distinct, capitalist, free enterprise society with its laws and liberties intact.

And Hong Kong's poor economic performance reflected that

lack of confidence.

:

When the draft of the Joint Declaration was published

in September 1984 it was greeted in Hong Kong, and

elsewhere, as the remarkable achievement it was. China had

agreed to an international agreement guaranteeing that

communism would not be imposed on Hong Kong after 1997, that Hong Kong people would govern themselves and that Hong Kong's way of life its freedoms, its international

connexions, its stock markets, its foreign investments

would carry on as before.

-

The Joint Declaration was signed after it had been

widely endorsed by the Hong Kong people as the best

negotiable deal for Hong Kong, not imposed without their

consent. And far from being "relegated to history", as your

editorial charged, it is the basis of every agenda item in