Hong Kong

LONDON – When nine years ago the British lowered the Union Jack on their last remaining important colony, Hong Kong, Chris Patten, the governor, buried his face in his hands for the entire world to see and felt the profoundest sentiment a proud and ambitious politician could experience – failure. It was indeed a personal failure to be added to his other great misfortune, the timing of elections back home in Britain that made it impossible for him to become prime minister and to fulfil his other ambition, to take Britain into the euro zone. But on that damp evening it was the people of Hong Kong, those who knew him well could tell, that pierced his conscience. The British had let them down. They were giving up a colony having unaccountably failed not to leave it a functioning democracy. In every country except Palestine in 1948 – when the...

LONDON–Almost a year after the British left Hong Kong this self-contained part of China– the Special Administrative Region to be precise–goes to the polls. Against the din of India’s nuclear explosion, the slow, but probably sure, toppling of Sukarno in Indonesia and the economic crisis in east Asia (which is now spilling over into Hong Kong) the question of how much democracy is going to be allowed to be practised in Hong Kong seems to be on everyone’s back-burner. Even the people of Hong Kong, who not that long ago came out on the streets en masse (one million out of a population of six million) to protest the killings in Tiananman Square, seem subdued- -or resigned. Perhaps this is a good sign. The transition from British to Chinese rule has gone not with a bang but a whimper in large measure because Beijing has been extraordinarily sensitive about not...

LONDON– The last British emissary to Hong Kong who seriously misread the situation got recalled to London by fast clipper and reposted as consul-general to Texas. Charles Elliot became unstuck because, as Queen Victoria put it, “all he wanted might have been obtained if it had not bneen for the unaccountably strange conduct of Charles Elliot–he tried to obtain the lowest terms from the Chinese.” Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s current government, is also about to be recalled to London. On June 30th after the union jack is hauled down at midnight and the yellow star hauled up he too will sail away, along with Prince Charles on the royal yacht, Britannia. Did Mr. Patten, too, seriously misread the bnargaining relationship with China, not by settling for the lowest terms, but by demanding too much? Perhaps, say his legion of critics, he totally underestimated the Chinese, endlessly provoking them by pushing through...

LONDON– The world has much to be thankful for that Deng Xiaoping died when he did, just four and a half months before the Union Jack is run down in Hong Kong. Britain and China, until last week, were set on what seemed an unavoidable collision course. If Beijing was holding the whip hand of divine power to do as it pleases, commencing July 1st., London, or in effect its audacious governor, Chris Patten, held the trumps of the electorate’s will. Against every brutish blandishment–“a serpent, a whore and a sinner for all millenia” Beijing’s foreign ministry called him at one time–he has over the last five years engineered Hong Kong’s entry into the democratic community. If Hong Kong’s citizens could fill the streets for days after the Tiananmen Square massacre then one can reasonably surmise that any move to take away their own new-found liberties after July 1st.will meet with...