Reports detail Britain's betrayal of Hong Kong to Chinese

By Jack R. Payton, St. Petersburg Times

Published: Sunday, Aug. 17 1997 12:00 a.m. MDT

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/577639/Reports-detail-Britains-betrayal-of-Hong-Kong-to-Chinese.html?pg=all

Turns out there's a good reason they call the place ``Perfidious Albion'' - certainly if you can believe the latest reports on how Britain sold Hong Kong's 6 million people down the river to the Chinese.
And so far, at least, there's little reason not to believe them.

Turns out there's a good reason they call the place "Perfidious Albion" - certainly if you can believe the latest reports on how Britain sold Hong Kong's 6 million people down the river to the Chinese.
And so far, at least, there's little reason not to believe them.According to these reports, Margaret Thatcher's British government was lying through its teeth during the 1980s when it repeatedly assured Hong Kong residents that they would get a fully functioning democracy before returning to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and that London would make sure they kept it for decades to come.
It now seems that at the same time Britain was making these soothing promises in Hong Kong, Thatcher's representatives in Beijing were telling China's Communist leadership not to worry, that London had no intention of keeping them.
Even worse, it also seems that Britain's colonial government actually rigged a referendum among Hong Kong's people to make it look as if they didn't even want democracy.
That might not be as shameful as Britain's behavior after World War II, when it used military force to stop tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors from seeking refuge in what was then British Mandate Palestine - but it's mighty close.
In any case, it's certainly enough to qualify Britain yet again for the Perfidious Albion designation. In case you're not familiar with this odd phrase, Perfidious Albion comes from an old French expression referring to Britain's use of treachery and betrayal in dealing with other nations.
And even if the reports of British behavior toward Hong Kong are only half right, treachery and betrayal are certainly the appropriate descriptives.
So far, it's looking as if the reports are considerably more than half right. The news of this latest perfidy seems to come from no less an authority than Chris Patten, Britain's last colonial governor in Hong Kong.
Not directly from Patten, of course. That would be so very un-British. Instead, it's spelled out in a recently published book by Patten's old friend, journalist Jonathan Dimbleby. Reinforcing the book's credibility, the British officials it accuses of having betrayed Hong Kong are now accusing Patten of illegally providing Dimbleby the confidential information on which it's based.

But let's not get sidetracked over who did or didn't violate Britain's Official Secrets Act. The point here is that Britain seems very likely to have violated a sacred trust toward the people of Hong Kong.

Thatcher's 1984 deal to return Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty this year also included a specific promise that the city-state would remain largely autonomous and governed by a legislature "constituted by elections." According to Dimbleby, when the Chinese began complaining about this later, British officials assured them - in secret, of course - that the promise would in fact not be carried out. The villains in question, according to the book, included former Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, former Hong Kong Gov. David Wilson and Percy Cradock, a foreign office China hand and former ambassador to Beijing.

Adding to this treachery, according to Dimbleby, was a 1988 "consultation," or referendum, in which Hong Kong's people were supposed to be given the opportunity to express their preference between democracy and whatever China had in store for them.

This is where the treachery gets especially crude. Dimbleby (and others, by the way) say the Foreign Office in London put out the word that a pro-democracy result would be extremely unhelpful. So the colonial government actually helped organize the pro-Beijing vote and even set up a two-tier counting system: Each name on pro-Beijing ballot petitions would be counted separately, while pro-democracy ballot petitions - no matter now many names were on them - would be counted as only one vote.

So despite the fact that the pro-democracy votes far outnumbered those in favor of Beijing, Britain's vote-counting office announced that the pro-Beijing forces were in the majority. Dimbleby describes the episode as displaying the kind of arrogance and effrontery "usually associated only with totalitarian states and banana republics."

While a lot of this might be new to many of us in the West, Hong Kong democrats have been convinced of Britain's treachery all along. Two of the most prominent democrats, legislators Martin Lee and Emily Lau, were extremely bitter about the British when I visited the city and spoke with them a few years ago.

The epilogue to this story, most of you know, is that Hong Kong's democratically elected Legislative Council disappeared the moment the city-state became part of China July 1. It was replaced by an appointive council that follows the Beijing line.

And Lau, who lost her job as an elected council member, is still blaming Britain for the debacle.

"The whole thing (the 1988 referendum) was shameless; it was so blatant," Lau said the other day. "Until then, we did not know how low the British government could sink."

That's why the phrase Perfidious Albion comes to mind. It may not be that familiar in this country, but it's an old staple in India and Pakistan - and a relatively new one now in Hong Kong.