Deng Xiaoping arrived first. Striding into a reception room of the Great Hall of the People beside Tiananmen Square, the Chinese leader paused to greet the assembled media throng, shaking each of us firmly by the hand – an affable yet commanding presence despite his diminutive stature (4 feet 11).
It would be a short wait before Margaret Thatcher (5 feet 5) showed up to meet her match, and she had no time to waste with journalists. (At a gathering in the British Embassy the day before, I had been offered several cold, pale-skinned fingers and a frosty gaze. I was still a colonial, despite my accreditation with the Financial Times.)
On her first visit to Beijing as British prime minister, in September 1982, the Iron Lady had come a cropper, slipping and falling to her knees on the steps of the Great Hall in front of the television cameras. It was a moment seen as gravely portentous by the superstitious residents of Hong Kong. The territory’s stock market and currency went into a tailspin.
This time — in December 1984 — the fall would be metaphorical but far more bruising. Two years after vanquishing Argentina’s armed forces and reasserting Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands, Thatcher had returned to Beijing to sign away a far, far greater colonial prize — Hong Kong island, Kowloon and the New Territories.
Soon after her second meeting with Deng, Thatcher and Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the treaty under which Britain committed to end its 142-year reign over Hong Kong in July 1997. The deal proposed a special, self-governing administrative region with a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign affairs and defence. Under the principle of “one country, two systems,” Hong Kong would maintain its existing government and economic systems separate from those of the Chinese mainland. Beijing agreed that its policies for the territory would remain unchanged for fifty years after the 1997 handover.
It was a deal born of necessity, dressed in improbable rectitude and bound to fail from the outset. And it was a deal negotiated with no representation of those most profoundly affected by it, the five million residents of Hong Kong.
When the matter of Hong Kong’s future had first been raised with Thatcher by British officials, she is said to have asked, “Why do we have to give it back?” In her 1982 meeting with Deng, she had tried the same approach, declaring that the nineteenth-century treaties governing Hong Kong’s status were valid and should continue in perpetuity. She would later complain to ambassador Sir Percy Craddock that Deng’s response had been abrasive and “cruel” — which might explain her flustered stumble on the steps as she departed the meeting.
In truth, Britain never had a choice other than capitulation. Hong Kong island had been seized in 1842 during the First Opium War. The colony was expanded in 1860 with the addition of Kowloon Peninsula and again in 1898 when a ninety-nine-year lease was signed over the New Territories. That lease, which expired in 1997, was the thread that unravelled the tapestry. Without the water supply and land of the New Territories — and without China’s continued tolerance of a foreign enclave on its southern coastline — the colony was unviable.
Perhaps the only surprise in the diplomatic fig leaf that the Sino-British Joint Declaration afforded Britain was that the Chinese honoured it for as long as they did. While Beijing’s abrogation of the promises it made in 1984 had been building an inevitable momentum for many years, it arrived with crushing finality this week when forty-seven activists were sentenced to up to ten years in prison for exercising the rights pledged beneath the signatures of Zhao Ziyang and Margaret Thatcher.
The “Hong Kong 47” were charged under a draconian national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020 in the wake of mass protests across the territory — protests triggered by the erosion of political autonomy and democratic freedoms. They were accused of conspiracy to commit subversion by taking part in primaries held ahead of the 2021 elections for the Hong Kong Legislative Assembly.
The group included some of the most prominent and respected leaders of the peaceful resistance to Beijing’s growing crackdown on dissent and political freedom. Benny Tai, an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, received the harshest sentence — ten years reduced from fifteen for pleading guilty — for his role as a key organiser of the primaries. He was accused of masterminding a plan for the city’s pro-democracy camp to win a majority in the general election and then block bills, eventually forcing the dissolution of the legislature and resignation of the territory’s pro-China chief executive.
Joshua Wong, a celebrated leader of the 2019 protest movement, was sentenced to four years and eight months, reduced by a third for pleading guilty. The court said he was an “active participant” in the primaries plan and “not of good character” because of his previous convictions. Gordon Ng, an Australian–Hong Kong dual national, was sentenced to seven years and three months.
Another of those convicted, and sentenced to four years and two months jail, was the popular journalist and former MP Claudia Mo, founder of the Civic party and a tenacious advocate for the pro-democracy movement. Along with the rest of the pro-democracy MPs, Mo resigned from the Legislative Council in November 2020 in protest at the disqualification of four colleagues at Beijing’s direction. In a message on Facebook soon after she was charged, the sixty-seven-year-old told her supporters, “I may be physically feeble, but I’m mentally sturdy… No worries. We all love Hong Kong yah.” She had been refused bail partly because of her WhatsApp conversations with foreign media and was refused permission to visit her husband, the British journalist and former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review Philip Bowring, when he was ill.
Soon after being sentenced to seven years’ jail, former Stand News journalist Gwyneth Ho released a statement on social media saying she had been prosecuted for participating in “the last free and fair election” in Hong Kong: “Behind the rhetoric of secession, collusion with foreign forces etc, our true crime for Beijing is that we were not content with playing along in manipulated elections.” Ho said the case marked a “turning point” that made Hong Kong seem a lost cause but she urged supporters to push back against authoritarianism: “Prove to the world at every possible moment, no matter how small, that democracy is worth fighting for.”
A day after the sentences were handed down, Jimmy Lai, publisher of the now silenced tabloid Apple Daily and the most high-profile of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy figures, testified in court for the first time in response to conspiracy and foreign collusion charges that could see him jailed for life. The seventy-six-year-old insisted he had never used his foreign contacts, including former US vice-president Mike Pence and former Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen, to influence foreign policy on Hong Kong.
Soon after signing the Joint Declaration in 1984, Margaret Thatcher visited Hong Kong and assured the territory’s leaders that the British government would take issue with any breaches of the treaty. “Britain has the right to raise any breaches with China after 1997,” she said. “We would not hesitate to do so.”
When the news of the Hong Kong 47 sentences broke this week, British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer was attending the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro. Fresh from a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, he twice declined an opportunity to directly condemn the court rulings.
Questioned during a BBC interview and again at a press conference about the sentences, Starmer said building closer economic ties with China was his priority. “Getting our economy working properly so people feel better off, is the number one mission of this government and that’s why a pragmatic, serious relationship is the right relationship to have with China,” he told the BBC.
It did not require a third denial from Starmer for the people of Hong Kong to draw the obvious biblical comparison. •
