TNAG-2702-FCO40-3908-Memoirs-of-Sir-Percy-Cradock--diplomat-and-sinologist-1993 — Page 196

The British, as in 1982, will seek to escape the

net of principle and concentrate on detail; but they will be

pressed for time and the larger concessions will no doubt be

expected from them. These will involve hard decisions,

balancing retreats from democracy as promised by the

Governor against the effects on Hong Kong of permanent

Therer will always be the option of

withdrawal from the talks and appeal to the Legislative

confrontation

•

Council; but such a break

would

probably prove

irretrievable; and the consequences would be so serious and

so unwelcome to Hong Kong, which remains after all the whole

object of the exercise, that it must be presumed that this

will remain the remoter contingency and that an eventual

agreement will be reached.

If an agreement is attained, it will no doubt be

argued by many on the British side that the results, however

small, were well worth the losses inflicted on Hong Kong

and on Sino-British relations in the course of the crisis,

indeed that the result could not have been obtained in any

other way. It may be claimed that only thus could honour be

satisfied and Hong Kong steeled in struggle. Others will

reply that the experience was a costly and unnecessary

lesson in reality; that there can be little honour in a

struggle to satisfy British amour propre at the expense of a

British colony; and that the same or better results could

have been secured more rapidly and at much less cost by

quiet discussion in the autumn of 1992. Most of these

assertions and counter-assertions will be unprovable. The

wise observer will shrug his shoulders at the theatre of

X

13