W***n 发帖数: 11530 | 1 London's Hong Kong Blunder
How the United Kingdom lost the loyalty of the island city's people.
BY Marcus W. Brauchli
OCTOBER 2, 2014
Thirty years ago this autumn, the United Kingdom and China agreed to
negotiate the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, after 142 years of
British control.
The news lifted Hong Kong's then-anxious stock and property markets and
renewed the city's profitable mandate as a primary gateway to China. The
colonial power and the future Communist Party-led sovereigns together
pledged that the territory would be allowed to keep its freewheeling way of
life, open press, and transparent legal system, all under a highly
autonomous local government.
It hasn't worked out exactly as promised. Business leaders who challenge
China come under financial pressure. Journalists critical of Beijing have
been attacked. The local government's autonomy is undermined by very public
pronouncements by Beijing's representatives in the city.
There are many reasons this has transpired, of course, but one largely lost
to history deserves illumination: three years before signing the Sino-
British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong in 1984, which laid out the broad
terms of Hong Kong's transfer and its governance thereafter, British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher gave up the greatest leverage London had to
ensure China's promises were kept. The consequences of that preemptive
blunder are evident today in the massive popular protests on the streets of
Hong Kong.
The leverage Britain abandoned was the most powerful it had: the loyalty
and citizenship of the city's people.
The leverage Britain abandoned was the most powerful it had: the loyalty and
citizenship of the city's people. It was they, after all, whose imagination
, diligence, and perseverance carved a spectacular global port city out of a
rugged subtropical coastline in a few generations. First factories, then
banks and shipping companies; today finance, fashion, and retail businesses
-- all powered by its people.
Yet in 1981, facing an abysmal economy and xenophobic pressures at home in
the U.K., Mrs. Thatcher's government enacted the British Nationality Act. At
a stroke, it rescinded most of its Hong Kong citizens' right of abode in
the United Kingdom. (It did the same for residents of other far-flung
British possessions, causing some Argentine generals to doubt London's
commitment to the Falkland Islands; war followed.)
British diplomats say that China never would have agreed to allow the
residents of Hong Kong to maintain their British nationalities, once the
territory was returned. But that has never been the point: the point is that
Britain preemptively gave up the chance to unilaterally grant Hong Kong
people who had been born as British citizens the continuing right of U.K.
abode after 1997.
It isn't difficult to imagine how different the dynamic in negotiations with
the Chinese might have been had they known that Hong Kong's people could
move away from the territory if China mismanaged it after regaining
sovereignty.
In the run-up to the handover, Hong Kong and Chinese officials drafted and
approved the Basic Law, the mini-constitution that sets out the terms of
Hong Kong's political development. No longer faced by the possibility that
Hong Kong's residents could abandon the territory if their interests weren't
protected, drafters wrote the law in a way that suited China and
acquiescent local leaders, not necessarily any democratic inclinations of
Hong Kong's people.
Today, the protesters of Occupy Central in Hong Kong -- a major group behind
the demonstrations that's demanding a fully democratic system for selecting
the territory's top leader -- must face the reality that the Basic Law
doesn't exactly promise what Occupy seeks. Instead, it says that Hong Kong's
next head of government, the Chief Executive, should be elected from among
candidates chosen by a "broadly representative" nominating committee. That,
Beijing says, is what it is proposing to implement, using its own judgment
to determine what is representative.
We can stipulate that China, which surely holds sway over any decisions
regarding the current protests, is acting loutish and even recklessly in
Hong Kong. It is inevitable in lowest-common-denominator decision-making,
the only sort possible in a system where politically risk-averse bureaucrats
agree most easily on policies that result in the least change and preserve
the most control.
But it's worth remembering that the seeds of trouble were planted a
generation ago in London. | W***n 发帖数: 11530 | 2 Before 1997, they ONLY cared about squeezing as many golden eggs as possible
from its CROWN JEWEL OF HER MAJESTY.. | x****u 发帖数: 12955 | 3 I wish they didn't enact that law too. That way, most of those who did not
welcome Chinese rule would have left, and we would have less of a problem
today. | W***n 发帖数: 11530 | 4 That won't happen. They are bloody hypocrites and bloody selfish. |
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