TNAG-2717-FCO40-3923-House-of-Commons-Select-Committee-on-Foreign-Affairs-enquiry-1993 — Page 50

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ignore what the Chinese Government is saying in a tonsidered and an official statement. It would be very foolish to say they don't mean it.

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Sir Richard Evans: All my experience and it goes back to 1955 is that when the Chinese Government speaks ex cathedra it means what it says. I would like to add two points. The first is I believe that I was negotiating in 1983 and 1984 and afterwards with people who were themselves negotiating in good faith. I really do believe this. It is beyond the bounds of Machiavellian possibility that the people with whom I fought over every paragraph, every sentence, every phrase, every word, every comma, for a year on all the issues dealt with in the Joint Declaration, were doing this as a mask, as a front.

And finally, and most challengingly, perhaps, I do not think that Tiananmen means that the Chinese are not to be relied on to honour the Joint Declaration.

Sir Alan Donald: I would like to say that they have specifically said so. It was ignored in the welter of emotion after Tiananmen Square when the Chinese made a statement on the 16th June, in 15 minutes explaining that they would honour the Joint Declaration. It was meant to address the situation in Hong Kong but of course it was not heard in the clamour.

Question:

That opinion would withstand some circumstantial evidence that the Chinese are a bit dismayed or puzzled at the degree of legal change and system change required to honour their own undertaking in the Joint Declaration. It turns out that two systems is a lot more complex than possibly some of them and shall we say even Deng Xiaoping himself realised. You still

still feel

feel that they will honour this Joint Declaration fully, even though it turns out to be a lot more complicated and require a lot more surrender of autonomy, or entrenchment of autonomy rather, than they perhaps realised to start with?

Sir Richard Evans: I think they will do their best to honour it. Because this is a two-edged weapon, the Joint The Chinese will get a great deal out of it by

Declaration.

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