Asian Document/The Brits Boot Hong Kong
Szamuely, George
ASIAN DOCUMENT THE BRITS BOOT HONG KONG n the morning of July 1, 1997 some 6 million people will awaken to find themselves under the rule of Communist party secretaries, Communist...
...The British, if they so wished, could try to get the best deal they could...
...Now, as grounds on which to defend British sovereignty over Hong Kong, this was hardly the wisest...
...And if pride is a matter of such importance to the Chinese, what are they doing about the Sino-Soviet border that they have been bleating on about for years...
...In the proposed Legislative Council, only ten out of fifty-six members will be up for election...
...True, no shot had been fired in Prague in 1948 but Soviet military intervention was darkly and repeatedly hinted at during that awful February...
...Whether it was the lease of Hong Kong or the Sino-Soviet border or the Sino-Burmese border, the Chinese accepted them, de facto not de jure, until such time as they, fully within their rights, decided to abrogate them unilaterally...
...The recently published draft of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, as Hong Kong is now to be known—in effect the constitution of the territory—states that China's government will have the final say in interpreting the Basic Law (and hence by implication all other laws of Hong Kong...
...It is not too much to say that the British have behaved with that peculiarly unattractive mixture of callousness and defeatism that has so characterized their posture in the world for the last two generations...
...examples of commissars arriving to take power not seated in the backs of Red Army tanks, or, at a pinch, in the backs of Soviet-made tanks, will at last be able to record the first-ever peaceful Communist takeover...
...A debate about Hong Kong in the House of Commons last July was carefully scheduled to take place on a Friday, the one day in the week when the Chamber is almost certain to be empty, as indeed it turned out to be...
...And the British, adhering pedantically to an agreement made at another time, at another place, with another party, were signing over 6 million of their subjects and one of the foremost industrial and commercial powers of Asia to a future that, to say the least, was highly uncertain...
...And as for economic freedom, who knows what the fate of Hong Kong's booming economy will be after Deng Xiaoping's departure from the scene...
...Nor are the prospects for press freedom any more encouraging...
...The British public finds the whole subject excruciatingly tedious...
...Since the Chinese have given all those solemn and binding undertakings to respect the capitalism of Hong Kong, it is not immediately clear why the presence of British administrators would have been such a great affront...
...ASIAN DOCUMENT THE BRITS BOOT HONG KONG n the morning of July 1, 1997 some 6 million people will awaken to find themselves under the rule of Communist party secretaries, Communist propagandists, and, last but by no means least, Communist secret policemen...
...Don't call us, we'll call you...
...What little does get written about it usually falls into the "twilight of the Empire," "the last colony," "inevitable course of history," and "we've seen it all before" school of 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 journalism...
...Why would it now be so monstrous...
...The rest of the world looks on with amused detachment wondering, in a vague sort of way, how this fascinating experiment of capitalists and Communists coexisting is all going to work itself out...
...The Communists were taking no chances...
...Fatuous as the famous "Westminster model" turned out to be when applied in alien environments, it nonetheless represented an ideal, a laudable aspiration on the part of the former colonialists, preferable to the current cynical cravenness...
...So, in 1982, eighty-four years after the signature of the Convention, the treaties had suddenly become valid...
...Responding to Mrs...
...A s for the cast-iron guarantees and the extreme trepidation with which the Chinese would approach any violation of their 1984 undertakings, a reading of William McGurn's collection of essays by distinguished residents of Hong Kong, Basic Law, Basic Questions: The Debate Continues,' is a refreshing reminder of how little store Communists set by "bourgeois" treaties...
...First, there is the old standby that, of course, nothing else could have been done short of going to war with China, a venture on which Britain, unlike in the case of Argentina, would probably not be able to count on U.S...
...Most of them are either refugees, or the offspring of refugees, from Communist China...
...The argument that today they are strong enough to rid themselves of this alien presence, whereas hitherto they were not, is not especially convincing...
...Had they in fact shown more guts and done this years ago, Hong Kong would not be in the terrible position it is in today...
...In this way, Chinese pride—after all, the onlything that's of any real importance in this world—could have been assuaged and Britain would have continued honorably to discharge her responsibilities to her subjects...
...Yet curiously enough, neither in Britain nor in the rest of the world has there been much interest in what has happened and what by George Szamuely is about to happen...
...Fifth, well, let's be blunt, there are 1 billion mainland Chinese and 6 million Hong Kong Chinese...
...In any case, whatever might or might not have been possible, there is no question that an agreement according to which as of July 1, 1997 Britain will have no role to play of any kind in the future of Hong Kong cannot but be an extremely bad and shameful agreement...
...And as for the wretched subjects, the 6 million or so residents of Hong Kong, they are simply being picked up lock, stock, and barrel and dispatched out of the safekeeping of their erstwhile protectors, Her Majesty's Government of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and dumped into the laps of their new masters, the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China...
...The Communist Chinese had long ago denied the validity of what they termed the "unequal treaties" that pre-1911 China had been forced to sign with the Western powers...
...For one thing, there is something of a contradiction between, on the one hand, asserting that the Communist Chinese have given their word and are to be trusted, and, on the other, arguing that the only agreement possible under the circumstances was one made under duress...
...Third, the Chinese are unlikely to want to antagonize the West by breaking their word and imposing Communism on Hong Kong...
...To be sure, textbooks of political science, hitherto short on George Szamuely, formerly an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, writes frequently on politics and the arts for Commentary, Policy Review, and other publications...
...Ironically, it was in the wake of Britain's greatest triumph of recent times—the recapture of the Falkland Islands—that the seeds of the present disaster were sowed...
...support...
...Elections for the ten seats are scheduled for 1991, but the Chinese have already made clear that, as of July 1, 1997, the Legislative Council will have to resign so that they can nominate candidates "who are appropriate" and to hold fresh indirect elections through a Peking-appointed "grand electoral college...
...In the four years that have passed since the Joint Declaration, not all of these reasons have remained compelling...
...It wouldn't have taken too much ingenuity to have taken the Chinese at their word about the invalidity of the "unequal treaties," abrogated the 1898 Convention themselves, accepted the Chinese claims to sovereignty over Hong Kong, but insisted on Britain's "jurisdictional right" to administer the territory on a day-to-day basis...
...Never before, throughout its long process of decolonization, has Britain handed over any of its former subjects to governments—democratic or otherwise—not of their own making and, most certainly, never to Communists...
...That idea has been quietly forgotten...
...Second, in the 1984 Declaration the Chinese gave cast-iron guarantees that they intended to preserve the distinctive Hong Kong way of life ("one country, two systems...
...Thatcher, the Chinese announced that Hong Kong would revert back to China in 1997, and that was all there was to it...
...The Drafting Committee was itself, incidentally, made up of fifty-nine members, of whom twenty-three came from Hong Kong, the rest from mainland China...
...Thatcher decided to be blunt...
...Both—the future and the former—masters have been eager to forget the fact that the British deliberately eschewed introducing democracy to Hong Kong, precisely in order to reassure the Communist Chinese throughout the 1950s and 1960s that they had no intention of turning Hong Kong into a state sui juris...
...about the Basic Law, or in Hong Kong for that matter...
...Obviously, no one can be sure if a better agreement was possible or not...
...I t is worth asking why so few ex- 1 pressed any worries about the 1984 Agreement...
...For the first time in history, a ruling elite will, without even a show of struggle, relinquish its dominance over society in favor of Communists...
...On a visit to Peking in September 1982, just a few months after the victory in the South Atlantic, the Prime Minister told her Chinese hosts that the 1898 Convention of Peking, according to which the so-called "New Territories"—part of the Kwantung province and the land upon which the phenomenal growth of the post-1945 Hong Kong industrial economy took place—were leased out to Great Britain by an enfeebled Imperial China for a term of ninety-nine years, was still valid and would continue to be until such time as it expired or was renegotiated...
...The Basic Law—remember, the Constitution of Hong Kong!—was only "a matter for China...
...Moreover, for forty years the Chinese Communists have, for politically expedient reasons, accepted the de facto presence of the British...
...Now there was a considerable amount of fraud in all this...
...And so negotiations began which were to culminate in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration...
...All the more inexcusable is this universal equanimity, as it becomes daily ever more apparent that both the Chinese and the British are already displaying a not inconsiderable amount of bad faith toward the people of Hong Kong...
...Trust us, or we march in...
...the rest will have been appointed...
...Alarmed that the British show of post-imperial belligerence might irritate the Spaniards to reopen the Gibraltar question and, more particularly, the Chinese to whine about Hong Kong, Mrs...
...Cozy, comforting, and picturesque as this kind of writing undoubtedly is, it overlooks the most important detail...
...This should not be taken to mean that Peking is not interested in the opinions of the residents of Hong Kong, merely that it will seek out these views through "private channels...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 35...
...Her meaning could hardly be clearer...
...For instance, the Joint Declaration promised that Hong Kong's courts would "exercise judicial power independently and free from any interference...
...One need hardly read McGurn's instructive collection to discover that Communists have no intention of living with political freedom and never will have...
...All twenty-three were moreover selected by the Peking government...
...It would never have taken all that much to have driven the British out of Hong Kong...
...Still, the British did not need too much intimidation...
...Many people thought that back in 1984 the British government had promised that Hong Kong would have an elected legislature...
...In March of this year they made their feelings known bluntly...
...Instead of a General Giap or a Marshal Rokossovsky, the commissars of 1997 will have as their escorts bland, pinstripe-suited, public-school educated, vowel-pinching English civil servants...
...Emily Lau, Hong Kong correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review, points out in McGurn's book that recent noises coming out of Peking appear to show scant concern for the "one country, two systems" promised back in 1984...
...Fourth, Hong Kong is their biggest source of foreign exchange earnings and they are hardly likely to want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs...
...For years the Chinese Communists had huffed and puffed that the "unequal treaties" were invalid, and yet here they were solemnly negotiating the conditions under which the leasehold was being returned to the owner...
...Ev'n victors are by victories undone," as Dryden put it...
...Peking's top official in charge of Hong Kong affairs, Lu Ping, declared that China would take great objection to there being any official debate in London 'Available from Review Publishing Company Limited, GPO Box 160, Hong Kong...
...Actually what makes this all rather poignant is that for the people of Hong Kong these new masters are not new at all...
...Like the one and a half billion or so of their soon-to-be compatriots around the world, they also never had the chance to decide if this was how they wished to spend the rest of their days...
...She quotes Madame Deng Yingchao telling Hong Kong reporters in 1986 that they were in the frontline of China's work on reunification with Taiwan...
...Without protest they have accepted the Chinese argument that since Hong Kong had never been a democracy it is hypocritical to make so much fuss now...
...But one cannot help marveling at the bone-headedness of the British...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
