38/COMMENTARY DECEMBER 1990
and future rulers at their word. In the 1985 local elections. a record turnout of 176.500 voters stunned cynics who had claimed that apathetic Hong Kongers would never participate in elector- al politics in large numbers. Later that year. almost half of the legislature's members became accountable for the first time to either functional constituencies or an electoral college. Suddenly the Communists were lacing the prospect of hav- ing to deal with genuine representatives of the people. Secretly. PRC officials demanded that Britain give them the power to approve in other words, to block any further steps toward democ- ratization—particularly, direct elections to the leg- islature such as were planned for the late 80's. When the British briefly demurred. Xu Jatun.
then Beijing › senior representative in Hong Kong, called a news conterence to rebuke Britain for allegedly "deviating" from the Joint Declara- tion. Knocking his eveglasses on the table for -mphasis, he warned against "major changes" in Hong Kong's politics over the following twelve sears. The next day. Hong Kong's volatile stock market nosedived.
The Thatcher government capitulated almost ammediately In January 1986. the British minister responsible for Hong Kong flew to Beijing and publicly committed Britain to "convergence." From then on. Britain would consult with China to ensure that the political system in Hong Kong evolved toward what China wanted in place in 1997. With this concession, Britain not only put democratic reform in jeopardy. it in effect handed China veto power over every major decision it might make during the eleven years remaining before the formal takeover. The "convergence” agreement also permanently compromised the credibility of the Joint Declaration, which had explicitly assigned Britain the unqualified right to continue governing Hong Kong until June 30, 1997. China could now sit back and let Britain do the actual dirty work of undermining demo- cratic reform. This it proceeded to do by slowing down the phase-in of direct elections to the leg- islature.
For Hong Kong, the lesson learned in 1986 and 1987 was that it could trust neither of the two countries that controlled its fate. And as this realization sank in, confidence in Hong Kong's future was further shaken by troubling news from Beijing. Once again. China was veering leftward. mocking the China hands' confident assurances of the country's longterm political and economic moderation. Soon, all the indices of public con- fidence in Hong Kong had begun to collapse. Emigration rose from 19.000 in 1986 to 30,000 in 1987 and +4.000 in 1988. The number of people telling pollsters they intended to emigrate climbed steadily after 1986 to 1.5 million. The economic growth rate peaked in 1987, then dropped in a straight line. hitting zero by the end of 1989. Also in 1987. capital flight began to increase.
These figures make nonsense of today's British claim that the transition to 1997 was going rea- sonably smoothly until the night of June 3, 1989. when Chinese soldiers marched into Tiananmen Square in Beijing and massacred unarmed dem- onstrators demanding democratic reforms. Earlier that spring, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents had marched and rallied to show their support of the Beijing students. After the massa- re, as many as one million people. representing the vast majority of tamilies in Hong Kong. marched again in outrage. What the massacre did was to bring out of the closet the private fears and secret contingency plans of the Hong Kong Chi- nese. Overnight. virtually every middle-class Chi- nese was talking about a plan to escape before the Communists took over. As for those resigned to staving, where many had been previously willing to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt, after the massacre they became anxious, bitter, and resent- tul.
A
FLICKER of hope that Britain would seize the moment of Tiananmen to speed up the pace and scope of direct elections was snuffed out early this year when the Thatcher government acceded to China's insistence that no more than 20 of Hong Kong's 50 legislators be directly elected before 1997. The British author- ities in Hong Kong have also been making life difficult for Chinese dissidents. arresting anti- Communist demonstrators. stepping up censor- ship of movies deemed potentially offensive to China, and remaining silent while Communist officials intimidate the population. Little is heard from Mrs. Thatcher herself.
In Beijing, Chinese leaders now view Hong Kong as, in their words, a counterrevolutionary base that must be suppressed. For them. Hong Kong's continued economic prosperity ranks a distant second to the need to eliminate it as a security threat. Almost every day, they find a new way of showing that they will tolerate no dissent when they take over.
Nothing illustrates China's new attitude more vividly than its repeated warnings that it may not recognize foreign passports acquired by ethnic Chinese born in Hong Kong. For decades, many affluent Hong Kong Chinese have used various means to acquire foreign citizenship as "insur- ance" for the future. Acknowledging the utility of such insurance, the British government itselft has reluctantly agreed to issue British passports to 50,000 Chinese families in Hong Kong. The hope has been that, secure in the knowledge that they have a permanent right to live in Britain or the United States or elsewhere abroad, foreign passport holders will not rush to emigrate but will leave only if post-1997 conditions become intol erable. But with China now threatening that it will not recognize the validity of these passports. the "insurance policies" have become exit permits
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