The Big Enchilada

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Dominic Lawson had an intriguing piece in The Sunday Times the other day in which he invoked President Richard Nixon to explain that China would not resort to using a big stick over Hong Kong because Taiwan is the 'big enchilada'.  

Here’s the real reason China hesitates to ‘liberate’ Hong Kong


Dominic Lawson - The Sunday Times

During a private event with Richard Nixon in London just over 20 years ago, one of my slightly awestruck fellow diners asked the former US president if China could be trusted to treat Hong Kong well after the territory was handed back by Britain. This, remember, was the man who successfully wooed Beijing away from Moscow’s ambit; and in sulphurous retirement he remained engaged with the world’s most populous nation.

Nixon told us Britons that we should not fear for the inhabitants of what would soon be our former colony. And why not? “Because of Taiwan,” he boomed, jowls shaking. “Taiwan is the big enchilada.”

Nixon went on to explain that Beijing’s eternal priority was to persuade Taiwan to rejoin a politically united China, and it knew that if it proved incapable of satisfying the people of Hong Kong, it would have no chance of courting the Taiwanese.

As I say, this was a generation ago. But, as one would expect of an unchanged regime, its priorities remain the same. Only last month China’s president, Xi Jinping, publicly reiterated Beijing’s overwhelming desire for reunification and added that the governing rubric of its relationship with Hong Kong — “one country, two systems” — was the appropriate model for Taiwan.

Even if it were not already the case that Taiwan had declined that kind invitation (and some months ago there were huge rallies there against a proposal perceived as threatening to increase Beijing’s influence), mass demonstrations in Hong Kong against Beijing’s attempts to rig future democratic elections in the territory are not exactly an ideal advertisement for the grand strategy.

In the Basic Law drafted before the handover, Beijing agreed to the “ultimate aim” of “universal suffrage”. Therefore a significant proportion of Hong Kong Chinese were outraged when it emerged that the territory’s chief, a former chartered surveyor by the name of Leung Chun-ying, had conceded that any of the candidates standing for election for the top executive post should be from a shortlist of two or three approved by Beijing.

Even though Britain was co-signatory to the Joint Declaration of 1984, which guaranteed that the people of Hong Kong would rule their territory “with a high degree of autonomy”, there has been a studious silence from No 10. David Cameron was stung by the abuse (followed by ostracism) he received from Beijing after he held meetings with the Dalai Lama in 2012; he was equally impressed by the complaints from large companies that he could choose to lecture China on human rights or drum up trade for British business in that country — but not both.

He took option two. So it has been left to the last governor of Hong Kong, Lord Patten, to — as he put it in the Financial Times — “invite an interrogation of Britain’s sense of honour”.

Intriguingly, one of Patten’s advisers during his governorship, Ed Llewellyn, is now Cameron’s chief of staff. I’ve heard Llewellyn was unsuccessful in persuading the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, to say something — anything — about the issue. Hammond is closer in spirit to those Foreign & Commonwealth Office old hands who regarded Patten’s campaigning for the rights of the Hong Kong Chinese as dangerous if not delusional. The Joint Declaration, in their view, was not so much a blueprint for democracy as a carefully ambiguous document designed to allow us to get out without too much disturbance.

In particular, the late Sir Percy Cradock, who advised Margaret Thatcher on her negotiations with the Chinese, had served in our Beijing embassy at the time of the Cultural Revolution; he understood — feared, in fact — the level of violence that could erupt in that country when political disagreement took to the streets. “Fatal, fatal, fatal,” he was heard to mutter, when listening to one of Patten’s addresses about democracy in Hong Kong. In fact, I spent a bit of time with Patten when he was governor. He was immensely popular there, greeted with spontaneous cheers almost wherever he went — which must have been all the more stirring for him so soon after he had been dumped by the electors of Bath in the 1992 general election.

Beijing legitimately observed that it was rich for a Westminster politician to campaign for full democracy in Hong Kong when the British had never granted that to its people during the 150 years of our rule there. We had given them a free press and a judicial system independent of the executive (probably the greater guarantee of basic rights), but for the most part Hong Kong was run — extremely well — in the interests of its businesses. In most ways it still is, and it is partly that which animates the demonstrators, idealistic young men and women viewing the current system as a stitch-up between Beijing and Hong Kong oligarchs whose dealings with Communist party bureaucrats are about mutual enrichment rather than public benefit.

Idealistic — and very brave, even if many of them are too young to recall the slaughter that the Communist rulers ordered the army to inflict on unarmed student demonstrators 25 years ago. On the streets of London last week I met a friend who came from Hong Kong and was deeply concerned that two of her nephews had joined the demonstrations: “These people — the Communists — can do anything; they will stop at nothing.”

It is easy for me to be less fearful: I have no young relatives whose lives might be at stake. But the Tiananmen Square massacre — when, to quote the great Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans, “a moat of blood was created in order to isolate the soldiers from the people”— was the regime’s response to what it saw as a terminal threat to its authority.

Precisely because Hong Kong is definitively different from the rest of China, with its people enjoying a legal right to demonstrate that would be inconceivable in Beijing, it should be possible for the politburo to concede ground locally without risking wider chaos. Indeed, two years ago Beijing backtracked on plans to introduce so-called patriotic education in Hong Kong, after student-led marches. And in 2003 a peaceful protest movement — against a proposed anti- subversion law that, among other things, granted police automatic right of access to private property on grounds of “safeguarding national security”— was successful.

That eventually led to the resignation of the then chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa. Like all great empires, Beijing expects its proconsuls to deal with local problems with the minimum of embarrassment: although the People’s Liberation Army has been stationed in Hong Kong since 1997 — I was there when it marched in — shooting peaceful demonstrators in the presence of countless television crews from around the world would amount to the bitterest failure on the part of Beijing.

It would also be a moral crime, of course, but in the Chinese communist mentality, still with a strong residue of Leninism, that is a bourgeois concept of no relevance whatever. From Beijing’s point of view this is only and absolutely about power — its retention and durability. That is why the Chinese government has worked so hard to prevent television viewers and internet users on the mainland from seeing what is happening in Hong Kong.

In Taiwan, however, there is no such news blackout: another reason for Beijing not to order the People’s Liberation Army to do any more “liberating”.

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