50
The Other Hong Kong Report 1993
period are acceptable unless they have been specifically endorsed by China in advance. The current state of play will become clearer when the Governor delivers his second annual address to the Legislative Council on 6 October 1993 but good-news from the political frontline is most improbable.
Winning the War for Autonomy?
What really matters for Hong Kong is not whether Mr. Patten wins or loses the battle he started last year to claw back for Hong Kong people some of the political power granted to them in the Joint Declaration but surrendered to China in accordance with the convergence policy. It is whether he can win the war for their right to exercise some degree of autonomy in the management of their internal affairs under the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
Patten's row with Beijing over the political rights of Hong Kong's six million people has already shifted Hong Kong and its problems from the wings of international affairs and closer to centre stage. Unwelcome as it is to China, this internationalization of local concern that Hong Kong should continue to be governed according to the principles of freedom within the rule of law, is likely to prove more effective as a deterrent to arbitrary surrogate rule by Beijing, after 1997, than the implementation of Patten's constitutional package.
The Verdict on Patten
In 1988, the late David Bonavia, former Beijing correspondent of The Times, wrote in a perceptive foreword to Basic Law, Basic Questions (Ed. W. McGurn, Review Publishing Co., Ltd.), that while Britain's attempts to bestow on her colonies what was best in her own institutional heritage had not always been successful, at least she had tried to do the right thing. Not sa in Hong Kong where the British have failed to live up to their own ideals. The results of Chris Patten's late bid to redress that failure, to borTOW Bonavia's words, "may be tolerable, or may be terrible", but at least he will go down in history as "having been seen to have tried harder". That is something, surprisingly enough, that both Sun Yat-sen and Lee Kuan-yew would recognize as being in China's long-term interests.
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.