TNAG-2329-FCO40-3373-Hong-Kong-contacts-with-academics-and-writers-1991 — Page 19

1.9.

1.10.

Asia-Pacific region, but also the world as a whole.

Stability is

the precondition for building socialist modernisation. Without a stable environment and with chaos prevailing, people will not be able to focus their mind and efforts on reform and construction, and foreigners will not dare to come to China to set up plants, do business or conduct exchanges even if the doors of the country are

open.

To be frank, I doubt if the official PRC line will always be that the actions by martial law troops were "entirely correct and necessary". I have seen that the Tiananmen protests of 1976 were described at the time as

a "counter-revolutionary incident"; and yet by late 1978, the Beijing Party Committee had decided that they had been a "completely revolutionary event". The official reversal of verdicts and re-interpretation of the incident went so far as to say: -

"The people and the people alone decide the destiny of China and

determine the advance of history Who organised the April events in Tiananmen Square? The people. Who directed these events? The people

And doubtless that was what happened this time around as well. And doubtless the leadership of the PRC will recognise it in due course.

This project is about building understanding and trust. It is about being understood correctly for what one believes in. And just as Chinese officials and institutions want to be understood for what they believe in, so in precisely the same way, we in the U.K. and Hong Kong should not compromise on our own values by failing to register them in the right way.

The only way to build genuine trust with the PRC is to be direct about what it is one believes in and stands for. Without doing so, one runs the risk of being misunderstood at precisely the time when it matters most that one is not. The future of Hong Kong depends on such trust being established. In this way is the agreement underwritten between Britain and China that Hong Kong's "lifestyle" shall remain unchanged for 50 years from 1997; by that, and by the fact that it, Joint Declaration, is a binding international agreement, registered at the UN.

"Lifestyle" or "way of life" is considered in Part Two of this report. Way of life includes the methods of government and administration, and the values and practices of the legal system; but it goes far beyond these. The questions of how the citizen can affect government thinking, the duties the state owes its people, and similar subjects concerning the relationship of government to governed are important in this context. Limiting state authority is a traditional concept in Britain, while it is less so in Hong Kong in principle, but things do seem to have been alright in practice with certain exceptions. In China, however, "policies occupy the leading position and law serves to