36/COMMENTARY DECEMBER 1990
bidding the British from devising a solution of
their own.
Just such a solution was urged upon Britain in the ensuing years by many concerned Hong Kong businessmen and other leading residents. Their argument was that, since China did not recognize the validity of the lease, it could not object if Britain unilaterally nullified it or its expiry date. Yet in the 1979-82 period, the British. brusquely dismissed all such proposals as legally or constitutionally impossible. Officials were fond of drawing an analogy to a private lease; unless China and Britain, like landlord and tenant, agreed on renewal terms, they said, no legal va- lidity would attach to British actions.
In fact, however, this claim was false. As Peter Wesley-Smith of the University of Hong Kong, the world's leading expert on the “unequal treaties,'' repeatedly argued, there were absolutely no im- pediments in British law to remaining in the New Territories, and the rest of Hong Kong, after 1997. The real obstacles were not legal at all, but po- litical and diplomatic: the British government's China hands could not devise a legal solution because their clumsy actions in 1979 had prompt- ed an alarmed China to warn them against such
a move.
H
V
ow did the 1979 blunder come about? It should have been obvious to Mac- Lehose. Wilson, and their colleagues in the For- eign Office that, given both the history of Com- munism and the recent history of China, a Chinese takeover would be a disaster for Hong Kong. Their mission therefore should have been to do everything possible to keep Britain in Hong Kong as long as they could, or, to put it negatively, to minimize the chance that the 1997 deadline would precipitate a takeover.
The failure of the Foreign Office to do this was rooted in a deep ambivalence about Hong Kong itself. Late 1978 and early 1979 marked the tail end of the post-Suez, pre-Thatcher era in British foreign policy. The country was in genteel decline, the Foreign Office steeped in a culture of retreat from power and responsibility, particularly in those areas that had once made up the British empire. The ruling Labor party was particularly hostile to Hong Kong. It was not only a colony, and therefore anachronistic, it was an embarrass- ing-because successful-example of vulgar cap- italism. Its cheap, well-made exports threatened the jobs of union workers in Britain's most in- efficient industries. Neither among the China hands in the Foreign Office, nor among their masters, was there a determination to keep and protect Hong Kong. Writes Kevin Rafferty, a Brit- ish journalist with long experience in Hong Kong: "In spite of the highflown phrases of com- mitment to Hong Kong, some influential figures
in Whitehall and Westminster were always eager to find an easy way of surrendering colonial rule.”
But the political and ideological bent of the Foreign Office's China hands is insufficient to explain their fatally careless handling of the Hong Kong issue in 1979. At least as important was their failure to understand a country, China, they prided themselves on knowing well. In brief, they were convinced that China in the late 70's had put turmoil and radicalism behind it and had made an irrevocable turn toward moderation, sta- bility, and economic pragmatism. It required only one easy, additional step to conclude that, even if Hong Kong were taken over, there would be little to fear. The new China, with its overriding commitment to economic modernization, would never do anything to jeopardize the foreign-ex- change earnings and other tangible contributions that Hong Kong was making to China's devel- opment. It would never kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. "It's not that we trusted' the Chinese,” recalls one British official defensively. "but that we were confident they wouldn't do anything in Hong Kong to harın their economic interests.'
"We," of course, were wrong-both about Com- munism and about China. Today, MacLehose for one clearly recognizes the historically controver- sial nature of what happened in 1979. Interviewed earlier this year in London on the subject of his exchange with Deng, he at one point denied raising the land-lease proposal at all, at another point conceded that he had done so but asserted it "had absolutely no subsequent influence on what happened later," and at still another point shifted responsibility for raising the issue with the Chinese: "I wasn't frightfully keen on doing so but the Foreign Office said, 'Don't let the occasion go by without a mention.'
That is today. In 1979, the China hands were as one in their smug confidence that they under- stood China better than their new Prime Minister. And she, with many other more pressing issues to confront, was paying little attention.
From the fall of 1979 until April 1981, as anxiety grew in Hong Kong, the Foreign Office com- pounded the damage it had wrought by repeatedly pleading with the Chinese to "do something" about 1997. Eventually, the Chinese government established a working group to reexamine its Hong Kong policy. To a growing circle of officials in Beijing and their fellow-travelers in Hong Kong itself it had become clear during 1980 that the future of the fabulously rich city-state was up for grabs. And that realization let loose destructive forces of political opportunism and xenophobic nationalism, as well as personal greed and am- bition.
By early 1981, this circle had succeeded in trans- forming the issue of Hong Kong's future into a matter of national pride-could not the Chinese
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