TNAG-2119-FCO40-3025-Future-of-Hong-Kong-general-1990 — Page 129

run Hong Kong as well as, if not better than, the British? By the middle of the year the Chinese leadership decided in secret to scrap its old hands- otf policy and to tell the British to leave. Deng himseit may have been the last important holdout. That April. when he met the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, he was still indicating his satisfaction with the status quo. But by the end of the meeting, according to Carrington › principal private secretary, Deng finally under- stood that something had to be done.”

towns and adroitly, the Chinese began

S'to reveal their intentions. In April

1982. Deng said that Hong Kong could become Special Administrative Region of China under a new constitution promulgated later in the year. The next month. China began emploving tradi- gonal Communist united-tront tactics to line up support in Hong Kong for the takeover. China's top leaders coopted leading Chinese businessmen. inviting them to Beying and promising that they would be the ones running Hong Kong when the Brush ett On July 16, 1982, the Chinese lead-

rship Formaily innounced that Hong Kong would beco ome a Special Administrative Region of China under the one country two systems formu- la.

So by the time Prime Minister Thatcher arrived in Beijing to discuss Hong Kong's future, in September 1982. it was all over. Virtually every account of this meeting portrays a stubborn and intemperate Thatcher, spurning the wise advice of her Foreign Office and inturiating Deng by insisting on the inviolability of international trea- ties, including those by which Britain had ob- tamed Hong Kong. What these accounts fail to mention is that Mrs. Thatcher was also prepared to negotiate an agreement that would cancel those treaties and concede Chinese sovereignty in return for continued British administration of the col ony. In other words, she was trying, desperately, to pry Hong Kong at least partly free of the ught Chinese embrace into which it had been pushed by her Foreign Office. It was a rash gamble, and it backfired. Mrs. Thatcher's stance only strength- ened the hands of those who had transformed the Hong Kong issue into one of Chinese national pride. Within a vear, after other, similar last-ditch attempts, an escalating propaganda barrage by China and the near-collapse of the Hong Kong dollar and its stock market. Mrs. Thatcher caved in. By early October 1983 she had told Peking in a secret note that she was willing to negotiate an agreement under which Britain would depart Hong Kong in 1997.

While Sino-British negotiations continued be- hind closed doors. China accelerated the united- front activities it had begun in the spring of 1982. Every few months it would issue another sweeping but vague promise designed to reassure the nerv- ous people of Hong Kong. All the rights and freedoms then enjoyed by the people would be

WHO LOST HONG KONG: 37

retained after 1997. Hong Kong's social system and its capitalist economy would remain un- changed for 50 years. The new Hong Kong region would enjoy a high degree of autonomy. Hong Kong people would rule Hong Kong. Busi- ness leaders. professional associations, trade un- ions, and other groups were all separately assured that they would have a special place in the post- 1997 power structure. Chinese tycoons were led to believe that, in return for their patriotic support of Hong Kong's reunification with the mother- land, they would wield more power and make bigger protits than ever before.

Despite these soothing words, however, there was another wave of panic in the spring of 1984 when the realization sank in that Britain was indeed on the verge of signing an agreement to depart for good in 1997. The publication of the Joint Declaration in September, followed by the formal signing ceremony in Beijing in December. came almost as a relief. All the promises that China had made in its propaganda campaign were in the document.*

VI

"HE mood of relief lasted a sear. By late 1985. Beijing had grown alarmed over

a new issue-the unexpected enthusiasm Hong Kong residents were showing for democracy

There had been inttle demand for democracy in Hong Kong as long as the British kept govern- ment functions to a minimum and remained re- sponsive to public opinion. But now many in Hong Kong sensibly believed that only a directly elected legislature, speaking for the people, could resist the inevitable efforts by Beijing atter 1997 to chip away at the city-state's traditional political and economic freedoms. The emerging democrats wanted these elections to be phased in rapidly, so that the people's representatives would be expe- rienced and entrenched in the legislature well before 1997. Some British officials at that time strongly agreed. Shortiv before the Joint Declara- tion was unveiled in 1984, the colonial govern- ment announced its intention to introduce a sys- tem of government "more directly accountable to the people of Hong Kong." For its part. Beijing grudgingly promised in the Joint Declaration that Hong Kong's legislature. then largely appointive. would be "constituted by elections."

The people enthusiastically took their current

• At a press conference in Hong Kong two days after the signing ceremony. Mrs. Thatcher was asked about the crucial Deng-MacLehose meeting in 1979. Replied the Prime Minister I do not know the contents of any talks which Lord Mac- Lehose may have had." That Mrs. Thatcher may indeed have been kept ignorant of the significance of this key event seems plausible given her relationship with the Foreign Offices China hands. From the ume she took office until she signed the 1984 surrender document, savs a well-informed official in London, the China hands viewed Thatcher as the key prob lem. not the Chinese."