Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [161]
But he was not to be persuaded. At one point he said that the Chinese could walk in and take Hong Kong later today if they wanted to. I retorted that they could indeed do so, I could not stop them. But this would bring about Hong Kong’s collapse. The world would then see what followed a change from British to Chinese rule.
For the first time he seemed taken aback: his mood became more accommodating. But he had still not grasped the essential point, going on to insist that the British should stop money leaving Hong Kong. I tried to explain that as soon as you stop money going out you effectively end the prospect of new money coming in. Investors lose all confidence and that would be the end of Hong Kong. It was becoming very clear to me that the Chinese had little understanding of the legal and political conditions for capitalism. They would need to be educated slowly and thoroughly in how it worked if they were to keep Hong Kong prosperous and stable. I also felt throughout these discussions that the Chinese, believing their own slogans about the evils of colonialism, just did not realize that we in Britain considered we had a moral duty to do our best to protect the free way of life of the people of Hong Kong.
For all the difficulties, however, the talks were not the damaging failure which they might have been. Although I failed to achieve my initial objective, I managed to get Deng Xiaoping to agree to a short statement which, while not pretending that we had reached agreement, announced the beginning of talks with the common aim of maintaining the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong. It was essential that something of the sort be said to bolster the fragile confidence back in Hong Kong. Neither the people of the colony nor I had secured all that we wanted, but I felt that we had at least laid the basis for reasonable negotiations. We each knew where the other stood.
The visit had been a full and tiring one. It was not all business, however, and there was time for a little sightseeing. While I was in China I had been able to visit the extraordinarily beautiful Summer Palace on the north-western outskirts of Peking, known in Chinese as the Garden of Peaceful Easy Life. I felt that this was a less than accurate description of my own visit to the Far East.
THE BERLIN WALL
The following month I visited another monument which, unlike the Summer Palace, has now crumbled into rubble and dust. After talks with Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Bonn, I flew to Berlin and gained my first sight of the Berlin Wall and of the grey, bleak and devastated land beyond it in which dogs prowled under the gaze of armed Russian guards. Chancellor Kohl accompanied me on this visit and, whatever difficulties would arise in the future, on matters like the evils of communism and commitment to our American allies we were as one. I suspect that the German press understood, as their comments later suggested, how powerfully moved I was by Berlin. The city was vibrant and exciting, larger than I had thought, surrounded by beautiful woods — yet uniquely scarred by the two totalitarian creeds of the twentieth century.
In my speech that afternoon — Friday 29 October — I said:
There are forces more powerful and pervasive than the apparatus of war. You may chain a man — but you cannot chain his mind. You may enslave him — but you will not conquer his spirit. In every decade since the war the Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles … one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.
My prophesy has been vindicated earlier than I could ever have expected.
* By the end of the decade 25–30 per cent of GNP was commonly estimated.
* Germany had forsworn