c.
BP1ABC
DRAFT
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.
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Let us examine the facts. 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 signed up 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.
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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
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