Abstract
In September 1982, Margaret Thatcher, fresh from her victory in the Falklands war, visited Beijing.1 By this time, it was clear to British diplomats that China intended to reclaim Hong Kong in 1997. Taiwan was no longer to be seen as the model which Hong Kong would follow. Instead, Hong Kong would provide the model for reunification with Taiwan. Thatcher states in her memoirs that Britain’s negotiating position was founded on ‘Britain’s sovereign claim to at least a part of the territory’, but that she ‘could not ultimately rely on this as a means of ensuring the future prosperity and security of the Colony’. Britain’s aim was ‘to exchange sovereignty over the island of Hong Kong in return for continued British administration of the entire Colony well into the future.’2
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Notes
This chapter deals with the negotiations leading to the Joint Declaration. It draws on accounts in the following sources, some of whom are commentators and others participants in the negotiations themselves: David Bonavia, Hong Kong 1997: The Final Settlement (Hong Kong: South China Morning Post Ltd., 1985)
Robert Cottrell, The End of Hong Kong: The Secret Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat (London: John Murray, 1993)
Percy Cradock, Experiences of China (London: John Murray, 1994)
Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (London: Macmillan, 1994)
Mark Roberti, The Fall of Hong Kong: China’s Triumph and Britain’s Betrayal (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994)
Ian Scott, Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Gerald Segal, The Fate of Hong Kong (London: Simon & Schuster, 1993)
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1995)
Dick Wilson, Hong Kong! Hong Kong! (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
James T.H. Tang and Frank Ching, ‘The MacLehose-Youde Years: Balancing the “Three-Legged Stool,” 1971–86’, in Ming K. Chan (ed), Hong Kong Becoming China: The Transition to 1997: Precarious Balance: Hong Kong Between China and Britain (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994) pp. 144–5
Martin Lee, ‘The Fight For Democracy’, in Sally Blyth and Ian Wotherspoon (eds.), Hong Kong Remembers (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 233–43.
See Michael Yahuda, Hong Kong: China’s Challenge (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 72.
Demonstrating an ignorance of Britain’s imperialist intervention in China, Thatcher went so far as to state that, through the 19th and early 20th centuries, Sino-British ‘cultural and scientific contact went from strength to strength’. Cited in Chalmers Johnson, ‘The Mousetrapping of Hong Kong: a Game in Which Nobody Wins’ Asian Survey (vol. 24, no. 9, 1984) p. 895.
See for example, Richard Solomon, ‘Friendship and Obligation in Chinese Negotiating Style’ in Hans Binnendijk, (ed.) National Negotiating Styles (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Service Institute, US Department of State, 1987)
Lucien Pye, Chinese Commercial Negotiating Style (Cambridge: Oelgescher, Bunn and Hain, 1982).
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© 1998 John Flowerdew
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Flowerdew, J. (1998). The Negotiations and the Joint Declaration. In: The Final Years of British Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26135-2_3
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