Hk Observer: The Joint Declaration thirty years on

Robert Carroll

The Joint Declaration, the Sino-British treaty for post-1997 Hong Kong, signed thirty years ago, tomorrow, was intended as a guarantee to maintain the prosperity and freedoms of Hong Kong, under the one country two systems principle.  Given the vast gulf between the ideologies and mind sets of the two countries’ leaders it was a remarkable deal. Credit must be given to both sides for reaching an unprecedented agreement whereby a partially democratic capitalist city would be subsumed, with a very high degree of autonomy, into a communist state. Nevertheless at the time the promises were far from reassuring enough for most Hong Kongers.
When China declared there would be no continuation of British rule over Hong Kong in the early 1980s, property prices crashed and hundreds of thousands of citizens emigrated in the next two decades; 300,000 to Canada alone. Such was the fear of communist control that many more, perhaps over half the population would have emigrated if they had had the means to do so, or would have obtained a foreign passport.  Most of the fear was based on personal or close family experiences under Chinese communism on the mainland and lack of trust in the Chinese Communist Party to keep its promises.
Five years after the signing of the treaty, the People’s Liberation Army’s killing of student protestors in Tiananmen Square was to cement those fears further, and local sympathy and support for the student movement has dogged relations between Hong Kong and Beijing ever since.  It’s perfectly understandable that local people got carried away with the spirit of the times – communism was about to end in Eastern Europe, and many expected more freedom in China too – but objectively, in hindsight, for Hong Kongers to have been involved the mainland student movement seems to have been a grave error of judgment; that is, to back the losing side.
It’s of course impossible to say how much Hong Kong would have been better off if some citizens had not been involved in financing and logistically supporting the 1989 Beijing student movement. Then as well Hong Kongers arranging clandestine escape routes for student leaders, a million people protested in the streets after the killings. Henceforth for Beijing the territory became labelled as a potential centre for subversion which has had lasting effects as to how much freedom the central leadership will allow us regardless of the Joint Declaration and Basic Law.
Beijing’s suspicion of Hong Kong increased during the last years of British rule as a former heavyweight UK politician, Chris Patten, came from London with a mission to democratize the territory against China’s will and reportedly contrary to its understanding of previous agreements. Hong Kongers had a taste of one-man vote elections not just for district boards but for the legislature and showed where their sympathies lay. The Democratic Party, pushing for more democracy here and calling for the same on the mainland, won massively in both against pro-Beijing business parties. With pro-democracy politicians – some of whom were calling for the end of one party rule in China -­ getting more votes in LegCo elections ever since 1995 than pro-Beijing politicians, though that gap is now much narrowed, it’s hardly surprising that Chinese leaders are not fans of genuine democracy for Hong Kong.
Should we then be surprised that the glowing promises of the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law have been interpreted by Beijing to curtail promised expansion of electoral freedom as much as possible?