China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower by Dikötter Frank

Author:Dikötter, Frank [Dikötter, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics, Business
ISBN: 9781639730513
Amazon: 1639730516
Goodreads: 60070311
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-09-22T07:00:00+00:00

8 Big Is Beautiful (1997–2001)

On 30 June 1997 the union flag at Government House was lowered for the last time to the sound of ‘God Save the Queen’. Chris Patten fought back tears in the drizzle. Later that evening, at the official handover ceremony inside the newly constructed Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wanchai, a beaming Jiang Zemin strode to the stage to welcome a new dawn. Hong Kong, he announced, had finally returned to the motherland.

The last governor of Hong Kong sailed away later that night on board the Royal Yacht Britannia, leaving behind the harbour that had welcomed its first colonial officer in 1842. At dawn, a long convoy of supply trucks and army buses carrying more than 4,000 People’s Liberation Army troops crossed the border. They were joined by a dozen armoured personnel carriers, with soldiers in camouflage uniform manning the gun turrets. They had last been seen in action in June 1989. Hundreds of residents waited in the rain to cheer their arrival, a few placing garlands around the necks of leading officers.1

Eight years earlier, Jiang Zemin had warned the city against interfering in mainland politics: ‘Well water does not mix with river water.’ He viewed the crown colony as a subversive base used by foreign hostile forces to undermine the Communist Party. When in October 1989 London had suggested that a new airport be built to instil confidence in the territory’s future, Jiang had viewed it as yet another imperialist plot to denude one of its colonies of its assets by handing out lucrative contracts. British prime minister John Major was forced to fly to Beijing and sign a Memorandum of Understanding on the project.2 The controversy allowed the leadership to achieve its objective, which was to find a way to interfere in every aspect of the territory’s affairs. They criticised the budget. They appointed a group of personal advisers who undercut the legislative council and encroached on the role of the government. They suggested that reliable candidates for top government jobs should be hand-picked and groomed. In public they preached stability and prosperity, in private they were rigid. When, in September 1991, a coalition of pro-democracy candidates won a landslide victory in the colony’s legislative elections, they expressed their outrage at the outcome to London.3

Instead of appeasing his counterparts in Beijing, in October 1992 the newly appointed governor Chris Patten responded to a widespread desire for greater popular representation by proposing that the electoral base for the legislature should be expanded. It enraged Beijing, where the reform package was viewed as a plot to subvert the territory’s political system. At first every effort was made to force the governor to retract his proposals, including dire warnings of economic warfare. Then, after the official government gazette published the proposed reforms in March 1993, a carefully orchestrated campaign was unleashed to cover the governor in invective. Li Peng fired the opening shot, telling delegates at the National People’s Congress that Patten had ‘perfidiously and unilaterally’ violated all previous agreements.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.