Government that we should do?
Sir Percy Cradock: First, reverse policy. Settle for the best you can get. Accept all the difficulties attendant on that, and I do not minimise them at all. We have got ourselves into a frightful hole but we still could retreat and that would be the right course. That is point one. Second, if that is not accepted, then we must do our best to limit the damage. We must keep lines open to Peking by all possible means. We must suggest to them, if we can, that they should not make up their minds finally on any of these points. They should wait and see what LegCo says. LegCo may not pass the whole of the various packages that are put to them. They may wish to modify them, they may even wish to cast some out. It would be a pity if the Chinese, on their side, have gone over the edge and taken up final positions without having seen quite what is going to come out in LegCo.
Next, we should do our level best to keep work going on the big construction projects which are for the future benefit of the SAR, and particularly the airport. We should argue this on the grounds that it is, after all, for China's benefit as well as for Hong Kong's, and that these things should not be hostages to the political crisis. We should try to do that but, let's admit it, by what we are doing we are casting away what influence we have over the Chinese in the matter of Hong Kong.
We must insist that the Joint Declaration stands and must be honoured in every particular. In other words, we encourage what I think is the Chinese tendency to say that they must
will obey the Joint Declaration regardless. If that is so, that is a very important point. The Joint Declaration will be a kind of safety net against the casualties of this high wire act that we have been trying to pursue, and that will be something.
We must also hope that the economy of Hong Kong will remain de-coupled from this crisis. It has been a very interesting feature of it that, unlike the 1982-84 crisis, where all it needed was a harsh word from Peking and the Hang Seng index went through the floor, this time, in the peak of the crisis, the Hang Seng has gone through the ceiling and looks like going on doing
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