TNAG-2790-FCO40-4029-Future-of-Hong-Kong-1993 — Page 45

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The Other Hong Kong Report 1993

in February 1984, when the form of the Sino-British agreement was under discussion, the Chinese side unexpectedly tabled á protocol. Its central element was a Sino-British joint commission to oversee all major aspects of Hong Kong's administration in the final years of British rule. This appears to have been Deng Xiaoping's own stratagem for preventing the British from plundering the wealthy colony before they pulled out. This protocol was much disliked by the British negotiators and even more bitterly opposed by Hong Kong's Executive Council. But at the last major breakthrough in the negotiations, on 28 July 1984, a modified form of Deng's much-favoured "joint commission" (the present supposedly "powerless" JLG) was accepted by the British for inclusion in the Joint Declaration, in retum for China agreeing to treat the Joint Declaration and its Annexes as one, single, binding agreement.

It now begins to look as if the Chinese negotiators accepted substantial British modifications to Deng's original supervisory commission, to make sure that it was included in the final draft of the Joint Declaration, but alk. along they intended to make the JLG serve Deng's aim of keeping an eye on the Hong Kong government and when necessary enable them to put pressure on the British, in private, to stop the Hong Kong government doing things which China did not want.

Deng's Veto and Political Convergence

There is much evidence to suggest that the veto was first used at the second meeting of the JLG in November 1985 to call a halt to any further unilateral development of representative government in accordance with the Hong Kong government's 1984 White Paper. It was from around this time that the Hong Kong government adopted the practice of outwardly encouraging public participation in the electoral process while secretly preparing to discourage the idea of holding direct elections to the Legislative Council in 1988. An account of how the survey of public reactions to the 1987 Green Paper was manipulated, to justify a decision to defer direct elections until 1991, is to be found in Chapter 2 of a memorandum submitted to the FAC on behalf of "1997 Concerns", on pages 196-99 of Volume II of the 1989 report. It is difficult to believe that the British and Hong Kong officials involved in this duplicitous process of restraining political development on orders from China could have failed to realize that the outcome might be a gradual buildup of political frustration and tension as 1997 drew closer.

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