Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [306]
I then went on to the crucial meeting with Deng Xiaoping. The most important immediate guarantee of Hong Kong’s future was Mr Deng’s goodwill. I told him that the ‘stroke of genius’ in the negotiations had been his concept of ‘one country, two systems’. He, with becoming modesty, attributed the credit for this to Marxist historical dialectics, or to use what appeared to be the appropriate slogan, ’seeking truth from the facts’. Apparently, the concept of ‘one country, two systems’ had been devised originally from Chinese proposals of 1980 for dealing with Taiwan. (In fact, it proved a good deal more appropriate for Hong Kong: the Taiwanese attitude was clearly ‘one country, one system — ours’ — and given their economic success and their move to democracy, I can see their point.)
The Chinese had set out in the agreement a fifty-year period after 1997 for its duration. I was intrigued by this and asked why fifty years. Mr Deng said that China hoped to approach the economic level of advanced countries by the end of that time. If China wanted to develop herself, she had to be open to the outside world for the whole of that period. The maintenance of Hong Kong’s stability and prosperity accorded with China’s interest in modernizing its economy. This did not mean that in fifty years China would be a capitalist country. Far from it. He said that the one billion Chinese on the mainland would pursue socialism firmly. If Taiwan and Hong Kong practised capitalism that would not affect the socialist orientation of the bulk of the country. Indeed the practice of capitalism in some small areas would benefit socialism. (Since then, it has become clear that Chinese socialism is whatever the Chinese Government does; and what it has been doing amounts to a thorough-going embrace of capitalism. In economic policy, at least, Mr Deng has indeed sought truth from facts.)
I found his analysis basically reassuring, if not persuasive. It was reassuring because it suggested that the Chinese would for their own self-interest seek to keep Hong Kong prosperous. It was unpersuasive for quite different reasons. The Chinese belief that the benefits of a liberal economic system can be had without a liberal political system seems to me false in the long term. Of course, culture and character affect the way in which economic and political systems work in particular countries. The crackdown after the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 convinced many outside observers that in China political and economic liberty were not interdependent. Certainly, after those terrible events we reassessed what needed to be done to secure Hong Kong’s future. I was reinforced in my determination to honour Britain’s obligations to those on whom British administration and Hong Kong’s prosperity depended up to 1997. In any case, I always felt Britain would benefit economically from talented, entrepreneurial Hong Kong people coming here.
So in 1990 we legislated to give British citizenship to 50,000 key people in the Colony and their dependants — though the essential purpose of the scheme was to provide sufficient reassurance to persuade them to stay at their posts in Hong Kong where they were vitally needed. We were also brought under strong pressure immediately to accelerate the process of democratization in Hong Kong. There were, in any case, strong moral arguments for doing so. But all my instincts told me that this was the wrong time. The Chinese leadership was feeling acutely apprehensive. Such a step at that moment could have provoked a strong defensive reaction that might have undermined the Hong Kong Agreement. We needed to wait for calmer times before considering moves towards democratization within the scope of the agreement.
If it was China’s recognition that she could benefit from extending the notion