Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (95 page)

Howe then flew from Beijing to Hong Kong, where he broke the news of the agreement's completion. To the Hong Kong public he declared that although the administration of Hong Kong would transfer to China after 1997, they had been able to ensure that Hong Kong would continue its same social and economic systems; he had in hand legally binding documents that would ensure Hong Kong's continued autonomy. The media reaction, both in Hong Kong and London, was overwhelmingly favorable, and the public, relieved that the period of uncertainty had ended, believed that the detailed agreement created a strong foundation for a stable, prosperous Hong Kong. On the day Howe made his announcement in Hong Kong, the local stock market enjoyed its largest one-day gain since the Thatcher visit had depressed the market two years earlier.
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After long hours of hammering out the details—work that was done by teams led by a British diplomat, David Wilson, and a Chinese foreign ministry official, Ke Zaishuo—on September 26, Ambassador Richard Evans and Vice Foreign Minister Zhou Nan formally signed the final document. In an annex, the Chinese spelled out in considerable detail their twelve-point plan for keeping on the foreign and local officials who had worked for the British government. They also agreed to retain existing laws, the judiciary, the international financial center, shipping arrangements, and the educational system. China agreed that these basic provisions would remain unchanged for fifty years and that Britain would be responsible for Hong Kong until 1997.
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On October 3, Deng welcomed the Hong Kong delegates who came to Beijing to celebrate National Day and reassured them that Beijing's policies would not change.
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And on December 18, 1984, Prime Minister
Thatcher arrived in Beijing. The next day, in a brief ceremony, she and Premier Zhao signed the Joint Declaration on behalf of their two governments.
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With the Joint Declaration in place, the Chinese turned their attention to creating the “Basic Law,” which in effect would be the constitution for the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong after 1997. This underlying law spelling out the future relationship between Beijing and the Special Administrative Region was drafted by a Chinese committee of thirty-six people from the mainland and twenty-three people from Hong Kong. Xu Jiatun was responsible for selecting the representatives from Hong Kong, and in the interest of winning over those who might resist Communist leadership, he chose prominent mainstream Hong Kong people who represented different constituencies and diverse views. On the closing day of the first plenary session of the drafting committee, Deng Xiaoping showed his support by meeting with the members and other officials and posing for group photos.
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In the deliberations at the ten plenary sessions held over the next several years to draft the Basic Law, there were discussions on all major issues—the nature of the chief executive and to whom he would report, how the Legislative Council would be formed, whether Hong Kong would possess a Court of Final Appeals, and the relationship between the courts and the executive. The drafters were a highly diverse group with very different views and different fears who managed to work together because they all believed deeply in their common interest in maintaining the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong Chinese businesspeople proved no more eager for Western-style democracy than were party leaders in Beijing. But the Hong Kong public was concerned enough about what the Communists might do that many Hong Kong drafters supported Martin Lee, an outspoken Hong Kong lawyer, who sought more legal guarantees. In particular, the Hong Kong representatives wanted assurances that the decisions of the Hong Kong High Court, which enjoyed a high reputation for integrity, could not be overturned by political leaders in Beijing. To enhance public confidence about the outcome of these and other decisions, Chinese leaders agreed to brief reporters from both mainland China and Hong Kong after each plenary session.
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Xu Jiatun had warned Deng and other high-level leaders in Beijing that the Hong Kong public had doubts about Communist rule, but the tremendous outpouring of support for British rule in the weeks after the death of
Governor Youde on December 5, 1986, still surprised them. Youde had been a hard-working popular governor, and in his death he came to symbolize the best of the British public servants in Hong Kong. He had kept peace in turbulent times, while people were being killed and starved on the other side of the border, and he symbolized the British officials who had provided a fair system of government that brought great prosperity to the colony. Several hundred thousand people took to the streets of Hong Kong to mourn Governor Youde and to commemorate the other British officials who had served the territory. Many Hong Kong citizens wondered whether the officials after 1997 would serve Hong Kong as well.

Deng was aware that the mood in Hong Kong was volatile. In 1987, when Hong Kong's fears were at a high point, Deng, in an effort to calm the people, personally, and without notes, addressed the fourth plenary session of the Basic Law Drafting Committee. As an attendant brought in a spittoon, Deng began by saying, “I have three vices. I drink, I spit, and I smoke.”
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He said that China would not waver in its commitment to socialism and to the Communist Party, for without that commitment China could lose the momentum for its economic growth, which would in turn be bad for Hong Kong. Yet China, he said, also remained committed to continued reform and opening. In Hong Kong, the basic political and administrative policies would not change for fifty years. He added that Hong Kong had been operating under a system different from that of Britain and the United States, so it would not be appropriate to adopt a fully Western system with three separate branches of government. He then articulated the kind of personal freedoms the public should expect: After 1997, China would still allow people in Hong Kong to criticize the Communist Party but if they should turn their words into action, opposing the mainland under the pretext of democracy, then Beijing would have to intervene. Troops, however, would be used only if there were serious disturbances.
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Deng's speech provided the kind of straight talk that the people of Hong Kong were hoping for. It eased their concerns, even as it effectively ended all discussion of establishing three separate branches of government.
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A final vote on the draft of the Basic Law was held at the eighth plenary session, which was convened in Guangzhou on February 16, 1989. Members were asked to vote on each of the 159 articles. Several of the original members had died, but each of articles was signed by at least 41 of the 51 drafters present. The next day, Deng Xiaoping met with the drafting committee to
congratulate them on their success. He called their document a “creative masterpiece.”
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On February 21, 1989, this draft of the Basic Law was released to the public.
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During the discussions, the two leading pro-democracy members on the drafting committee, Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, tried without success to ensure that the chief executive and the members of the Legislative Council would be democratically elected by the public. In the end, however, the Standing Committee of the NPC retained its final authority to interpret the Basic Law, and Beijing had the right to appoint the chief executive, to station troops, and to decide on issues that affected foreign relations and national defense. Hong Kong was given the right to retain its system of government for at least fifty years. It was to remain an open port, issue its own currency, permit free speech, including criticism of the Communist Party, and maintain its court system with local laws and the right to make final decisions—as long as they did not interfere with China's security or foreign relations. To the advocates of full democracy for Hong Kong, Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, the Basic Law betrayed the people of Hong Kong. To the leaders in Beijing, however, the “one country, two systems” formula gave far more autonomy to Hong Kong than any central government in the West had given to any local area under its rule.
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After the Basic Law was announced, it was received warmly in both China and Hong Kong.

Only four months after the signing, however, the optimism in Hong Kong was destroyed by the news of the tragedy in Tiananmen Square. To Hong Kong people, the specter that they would soon be ruled by a regime that could shoot its own people on the streets was terrifying. On June 4, 1989, out of sympathy for the students protesting for freedom in Beijing and out of concern for their own future, an estimated one million of Hong Kong's five million people took to the streets. The demonstrations were far larger than any in the history of Hong Kong. After June 4, thousands of Hong Kong people who could afford it purchased foreign property, sent their children abroad to study, and took out foreign citizenship. Sino-British relations, which had been proceeding smoothly prior to June 4, deteriorated rapidly.
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Even those working for China's NCNA in Hong Kong were swept up in the protests, and Xu Jiatun did nothing to punish the protestors.
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When Hong Kong's leading businessmen, Y. K. Pao and Li Ka-shing, visited a resolute Deng in Beijing shortly after June 4, Deng did not make any concessions. He said China had to meet the toughness of the British government with its own toughness.
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In January 1990 Xu Jiatun was replaced by Zhou Nan. Xu had passed the usual retirement age of seventy, but more importantly he had defended the Hong Kong people who had criticized Beijing's handling of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square; also, he was known to be close to Zhao Ziyang, who had been placed under house arrest in the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. Despite all his past successes in bringing Beijing and Hong Kong together, after the Tiananmen tragedy the gap between the views of Beijing officials and Hong Kong residents was too great for Xu Jiatun to bridge.

Zhou Nan, who had worked on the Hong Kong issue as an English-speaking foreign ministry official, was on a much tighter leash. He dutifully expressed Beijing's messages in a rigid and nasty manner. Zhou Nan was as unpopular in Hong Kong as Xu Jiatun had been popular. After several weeks, Xu fled to the United States, where he sought asylum and wrote his memoirs. Many NCNA staff members in Hong Kong who, like Xu, had sympathized with the protestors, were replaced by newly assigned foreign affairs specialists from the mainland.

A secret visit to Beijing shortly after June 4, 1989, by Percy Cradock, the great problem-solver of Sino-British relations, helped avoid a rupture between Great Britain and China, just as a secret visit by Brent Scowcroft at the time helped contain the damage to U.S.-China relations. Despite the strains from the Tiananmen tragedy, frequent close contact between Qian Qichen, China's minister of foreign affairs and Politburo member, and Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, helped overcome an impasse on the Basic Law that had become the main focus of the dispute: the number of publicly elected members. At the ninth and final plenary session of the Basic Law Committee, held from February 13 to 17, 1990, several months after the Tiananmen tragedy, the drafting committee took a final vote on the Basic Law, and on April 4, 1990, it was approved by the NPC.
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Before the Tiananmen tragedy, Britain and China had made a joint effort to put in place what they called a “through train,” a political structure that would continue smoothly after 1997. In 1992, the year Deng stepped down from politics, the British assigned Chris Patten, a leading politician, as the new governor of Hong Kong. David Wilson, who had been governor from 1987 to 1992, was, like his predecessors, a diplomat specializing on China. After the tumult from the Tiananmen tragedy, Wilson had managed to protect projects like the new Hong Kong airport, which Chinese officials had criticized, while quietly expanding the range of elections and supporting advocates
of more freedoms. Despite the tense environment, he had maintained professional working relations with his Chinese counterparts.

Chris Patten took an entirely different approach.
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He chose not to pay a visit to China before taking up his post and as governor was an outspoken advocate for increasing freedom and the number of popularly elected officials. He did not accept the views of senior foreign office officials like Percy Cradock, who believed that Patten was overlooking some of the understandings between China and Great Britain. He had highly adversarial relationships with Chinese officials throughout his tenure. In 1997, when the Chinese took charge, they undid Patten's reforms, charging that through Patten Britain had introduced democratic reforms at the end of British rule, hoping to force China to follow rules that Britain itself had not followed during its 150 years of governing Hong Kong. Patten's admirers claimed that he did his best to express the desires of the Hong Kong people and to fight valiantly for more freedoms, and that in the process he gave them an experience in democracy that continued to serve as a beacon after 1997. Critics in both Hong Kong and Beijing, however, charged that Patten had been self-serving; that he returned to Britain as a popular politician who had gained stature fighting for freedom, whereas those who stayed in Hong Kong had to deal with the turmoil that he had created between Hong Kong and China.

Some Hong Kong residents argued that Patten had derailed the “through train,” for the increases in democracy that he introduced did not remain after 1997. But from a broader perspective, there was a “through train” despite the controversies created by Patten's rule. The system that Deng set in place, through the Joint Declaration and Basic Law, was implemented as Deng said it would be. China kept Deng's promise to allow Hong Kong's capitalist and legal systems to continue without interruption and to allow Hong Kong people to rule Hong Kong. Mainland cities became more like Hong Kong than the other way around. Residents of Hong Kong could continue to criticize publicly the Communist Party and publish newspapers, magazines, and books banned elsewhere in China. Hong Kong increased rather than decreased the number of officials elected by popular voting. Hong Kong set a high standard for freedoms and legal protections, serving as a refuge for many who choose to live there and as a benchmark for many who live on the mainland. After the handover, Hong Kong remained, as before, a cosmopolitan, prosperous city that valued free speech and respect for law.