Perfidious Albion
McGurn, William
T he worst you can say about Sir Geoffrey Howe is that he has a curious knack of waddling and mincing at the same time. Not even his enemies would describe him as a bad hat. He is, on the contrary,...
...In March, the Economist editorialized: "Few people are naive enough to believe that, after 1997, Hong Kong will be a place whose citizens can choose their rulers or freely speak their minds...
...So obvious is this in hindsight," writes McGurn, "that some observers think Britain had decided to abandon Hong Kong long before the talks...
...Of the 581 multinational corporations whose Asian operations are based in Hong Kong, 252 are American, only 77 British...
...The following freedoms were guaranteed in the Declaration—of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of travel, of movement, of correspondence, of strike, of choice of occupation, of academic research, and of religious belief...
...and as unequal, and therefore invalid, treaties they could not form the basis of negotiations...
...the right of residence in the United Kingdom...
...That's how it might have remained if the British had left well alone...
...To hell with democracy and free speech...
...For most of his political career he was known, after a mild hypnotic, as "Mogadon Man...
...Democracy and the People's Liberation Army, which is to be stationed in Hong Kong after the handover, are natural enemies...
...Barely two years earlier Great Britain had gone to war with Argentina (even under the junta a saintly nation by comparison with the People's Republic) to defend the liberties of another group of Her Majesty's subjects, the 2,000 sheep farmers, roustabouts, and shopkeepers who inhabit the Falkland Islands...
...the mandarins of Whitehall are more inscrutable than the civil servants of Peking...
...To hell with the family, too...
...But the Falklanders were kith and kin...
...The point about granting them right of residence, as McGurn points out, is that it would provide them with an insurance policy...
...maybe, as China itself booms, even more than they make there now...
...In October 1989, the political adviser of the Hong Kong government assured mainland leaders that Her Majesty's government was well aware of what was not to be tolerated in the colony...
...And it is to America that McGurn looks for some easing of Hong Kong's plight...
...CI The American Spectator June 1992 55...
...must not be allowed to say that the Bill McGurns and the Bernard Levins and the Martin Lees were making a fuss about nothing...
...So long as Britain remains determined to see the colony handed over in 1997 bound hand and foot, there is little any outside power can do...
...Meanwhile, even poor, mistreated Hong Kong is on a roll...
...As William F. Buckley, Jr...
...In 1984 China agreed to accept a legislature "constituted by elections...
...Recent changes in U.S...
...William McGurn's achievement in Perfidious Albion is to demonstrate once and for all that this belief was misplaced...
...he looks an even better bet today...
...colony...
...Even the politicians, for all their PERFIDIOUS ALBION: THE ABANDONMENT OF HONG KONG 1997 William McGurn Ethics and Public Policy Center (Distributed by National Book Network, 1-800-462-6420)/ 188 pages / $16.95 reviewed by STUART REID 54 The American Spectator June 1992 renewed anxiety not to upset the Chinese, began to realize that something would have to be done to restore confidence in the colony...
...In the end, after much bitter debate, some of it perhaps racist in tone, Mrs...
...A happy (or tyrannocorporatist) ending will not in retrospect make the British government's conduct in this matter any the less lamentable, or, if you prefer, perfidious...
...It is a time for sad and sober reflection," said the governor of Hong Kong after the last body was removed from the square...
...Hannah Arendt introduced us to the banality of evil...
...its position on Hong Kong was the same as its position on Taiwan...
...It makes you think...
...Perhaps it could not...
...they are not...
...but in the Crown Colony itself the signing of the Joint Declaration was greeted with enthusiasm: the Hong Kong stock market leapt overnight to a record peak...
...The treaties by which these territories were ceded or leased to Britain were always regarded by the Chinese, with some justice, as unequal...
...Tiananmen Square—such an embarrassment—did nothing to stiffen British resolve...
...The opinion was lent some credence by former prime minister Edward Heath's admission that he knew of such a plan as far back as 1971...
...Thatcher's foreign secretary, Howe was responsible for negotiating the final terms of the Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong, a deal that today threatens the livelihoods, not to say the lives, of five million Chinese, 3.25 million of whom are British subjects...
...They did not, with the inevitable consequence, as many now see it, that an "unequal treaty" was imposed on Hong Kong...
...Perhaps, however, money has influenced British policy...
...In Peking itself, the British embassy failed to help Hong Kongers stuck in the city during the massacre...
...n 1984, however, it was still possible to believe that Britain was as concerned to defend the liberties of the Hong Kong Chinese as she had been to defend those of the Falklanders...
...The Declaration guaranteed, among other things, that Hong Kong would retain its liberties for fifty years after reverting to Chinese rule in 1997 (the so-called "one country, two systems" formula), and that until 1997 it would be administered by London...
...Thatcher agreed to offer passports to 50,000 families, which if taken up would have resulted in 150,000 Hong Kongers having the right of residence here...
...But if that happens—"if," because "indicators" are no more reliable than opinion polls—the men and women responsible for the Joint Declaration must not be allowed to claim a victory...
...He admires Britain for bringing stability, justice, and prosperity to Hong Kong...
...but the suggestion that the 3.25 million Hong Kongers who hold British passports should be granted right of residence was fiercely resisted by the Tories, who argued that the country could not absorb that many Chinese...
...The official response was muted...
...only the New Territories were due to return in 1997...
...By 1997 only one-third of the legislature will be democratically elected...
...But why...
...McGurn knows his subject intimately, having been stationed in Hong Kong with the Asian Wall Street Journal in the late 1980s, and he cares deeply about the people of the colony...
...He looked a good bet to many Westerners when he came to power in 1978...
...Perfidious Albion is a brief and lucid account of a dauntingly intricate geopolitical dance of death...
...admires, that is, British colonialism at its best...
...He is, on the contrary, a mild-mannered and deeply inoffensive lawyer...
...Why bug him...
...Anyone with the stamina to get through all that would have been able to persuade the INS that he qualified for a green card...
...The Hong Kong Government," he told them, "has no intention of allowing Hong Kong to be used for subversive activities against the People's Republic of China...
...the Hong Kong Chinese are not...
...Listen to the hardened optimists...
...If, like the French (whom God preserve), he regards Albion as perfidious, at least he does not think that the Brits (even those among us who happen to be English) are bad eggs...
...B ut we Brits were by no means the only ones to take a relaxed view of what happened in Tiananmen Square...
...How could it...
...No one, however, seriously supposes that three million Chinese would want to settle here...
...a reason to stay where they are, at home, among their own people, in congenial surroundings, in the knowledge that they could leave if the worst came to the worst...
...Not long afterwards, five pro-democracy activists were arrested for using bullhorns in public...
...Hong Kong has been betrayed...
...Emphasis added...
...So, it's all right, then...
...notes in his excellent introduction, Perfidious Albion "will both inform and mystify...
...Whether America's exercise in enlightened self-interest (limited though it is, in McGurn's view) steadies the nerve of the colony remains to be seen...
...Sure, there may be another Tiananmen Square, but you can't make an omelet without breaking heads...
...He might have yielded to bombast and bitterness, but no: his anger is controlled, his scorn measured...
...Thus one of the central planks of the Joint Declaration, one of the principal guarantees of continuing liberty—the understanding that when the British withdrew from Hong Kong the colony would be self-governing—has been abandoned, because it does not suit Peking's purposes...
...I was at a dinner party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a day or two after the massacre, sadly and, as it happens, soberly reflecting on this latest manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, when a woman opposite me, a very decent sort, said: "I don't know what George Bush is making all this fuss about...
...but the elections penciled in for 1988 were canceled, at the behest of Peking...
...And in his view Hong Kong might have remained under benign British rule indefinitely had it not been for the fidgets in the Foreign Office...
...immigration laws will make it easier for Hong Kong Chinese to settle in the United States than it is now for them to settle in Britain...
...But more and more people already believe that Hong Kong will still be a place where money can be made...
...Under this theory, Britain was to take a blustery line at the outset precisely to provoke the Chinese into insisting on taking back the colony...
...The authorities refused to grant a permanent site in the colony for a replica of the Peking students' democracy statue...
...Peking refused to put anything in writing...
...After all, we had Kent State . . . " Most ordinary Americans were outraged, however...
...Although most of them hold British passports, they do not have Stuart Reid is assistant features editor of the London Sunday Telegraph...
...certainly, the indicators suggest that China will abandon Marxism in favor of the sort of authoritarian corporatism that works so profitably on the Pacific Rim...
...This is not meant as a criticism...
...To all intents and purposes, Peking now rules Hong Kong...
...They were not...
...Peking had no interest in liberty, and Britain's notional interest in it was circumscribed by its desire to do nothing to offend Peking...
...And yet in 1984, as Mrs...
...Some of us realized as much at the time, of course, most notably the Times columnist Bernard Levin...
...Though Hong Kong is, in administrative terms, a British colony (at least theoretically), in economic terms it is a U.S...
...One thousand and four men died (254 of them British, 750 Argentine) in what is now widely seen as an unnecessary conflict: the open deployment of a single submarine to the South Atlantic would almost certainly have persuaded the Argentines to abandon any thought of taking the islands...
...so lacking in bite was he that Denis Healey, the Labour party's former shadow foreign secretary, said that having an argument with him was like being "savaged by a dead sheep...
...McGurn introduces us to the evil of banality...
...What business is it of the markets if, when the colony reverts to the PRC, Hong Kong mothers, like their mainland sisters, are forced to abort their second children...
...B ritain (it must never be forgotten) was under no obligation to return Hong Kong to China...
...Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to Britain in perpetuity (following the Opium Wars...
...American investment at $7.1 billion far outstrips British investment...
...In our dealings with the People's Republic we have adopted the obliging manner of the London taxi-driver: "Where to, guv'nor...
...Nevertheless, in 1979 the British decided to press Peking for written guarantees on the future of the colony, apparently to bolster business confidence...
...both were part of China, in theory...
...But to qualify for a full passport, each applicant had to complete a 32-page form accompanied by a general guide of twenty-eight pages and reference manuals running to hundreds of pages...
...The reason for the mystery is that it is impossible to read the Foreign Office mind...
...McGurn provides no hardanswers...
...Mainland China is a potentially lucrative market, and becoming more attractive to investors by the day...
...Martin Lee, leader of the colony's democrats and a bitter and brave critic both of London and Peking, aptly describes the Nationality Acts responsible for this singular injustice as the "Hong Kong Exclusion Acts...
...We have taken the Chinese exactly where they wanted to go, and by the shortestroute...
...The Hong Kong Chinese indeed are second-class subjects...
...If anything, Tiananmen Square made the British more anxious not to upset the Chinese...
...It was all nonsense...
...As we saw earlier this year, during the National People's Congress, Deng is winning the battle against the reactionary elements...
...so were most ordinary Britons...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
