BANKERS TRUST SECURITIES RESEARCH
Kong, and whenever necessary takes action to preserve that interest. The interest in Hong Kong's capitalist prosperity, and the strategy for preserving it, are one of the few areas of consensus for Beijing's otherwise deeply fragmented leadership. Current Beijing officials, dissidents, and scholars with access to the leadership's deliberations on Hong Kong all
testify to that consensus.
CREDIBILITY
This perspective of Beijing's self-interest can shed light on a second central issue, namely whether Beijing can be trusted to implement its promise of 50 years of post-1997 autonomy and capitalism for Hong Kong. After Tiananmen Square, it became popular to argue that the massacre of June 1989 proved that Beijing's promises could not be trusted and therefore Hong Kong could not rely upon the Joint Declaration of 1984 regarding Hong Kong's future autonomy.2
This extremely negative view displaced the previous, overwhelmingly positive, conventional wisdom, which was that Beijing had never dishonored a major international commitment and therefore could be trusted to honor this one in exactly the way it was interpreted by Western press commentators. Both these extreme views prove weak in the evidence. Truth lies in the middle. Contrary to post-June 1989 wisdom, it remains true that Beijing has never dishonored a major international committment, but it should surprise nobody that it interprets the Joint Declaration in its
own way.
China's record for honoring its commitments is indeed unusually strong. In some ways, its record is superior to those of the major industrial democracies. But it is also true that Beijing has a talent for writing agreements that are subject to considerable adjustments of interpretation depending on the circumstances and the interpreter. (In other words, Beijing acts as if it had a particularly good Western lawyer.) For instance, it gave Tibet autonomy under central leadership—and autonomy got the emphasis during the negotiations while central leadership got the emphasis later. 3 Thus, there is a dual lesson in any survey of Beijing's behavior: first, after setting aside a good many footnotes about commercial behavior that is different from the West's, its credibility at honoring most formal agreements is remarkably good; second, it is vital to understand how Beijing interprets those agreements and to understand that its interpretation will of course align with its own self-interest. Whether the Hong Kong agreement works disastrously like Tibet's or well (like some agreements with surrendered KMT generals) depends on Beijing's perception of its
self-interest.
China honors its
commitments...
but its commitments
are ambiguous
3
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