What's Britain to do about Hong Kong?
Eight years from now, China is scheduled to take back control of Hong Kong, which is now a British colony.Though Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is as shocked as anyone by the recent carnage in Beijing, she has announced that she intends to stand by that agreement. Though 3.5 million of Hong Kong's residents hold British passports, they will not be permitted to emigrate to Britain.
This leaves Hong Kong facing the prospect of being ruled by an insecure, secretive, and repressive regime that could show about as much respect for its promise to maintain the colony's autonomy for 50 years as it did for the lives of the 3,000 students gunned down in Tiananmen Square.
It also leaves Britain with the dubious distinction of becoming the first democracy ever to force its passport holders to live under communist rule.
But Britain's hands are largely tied. Trying to tear up the agreement would be futile folly. Hong Kong gets its food and water from China and is militarily indefensible. The tiny colony has no army of its own. The Chinese army would have less trouble taking over Hong Kong than it did taking over Tianamen Square.
Moreover, if three-million immigrants were to land from Hong Kong, they would more than double the present ethnic minority inhabitants of Britain and exert a severe strain on the economy and government services.
But Britain could install a more democratic government in Hong Kong before it leaves. Present plans call for merely 28 percent of Hong Kong's legislature to be directly elected by 1997, rising to 50 percent a decade later. How about stepping up the schedule to, say, 50 percent of the legislators directly elected by 1997, rising to 100 percent five or six years later?
Moreover, how about getting other nations to share the burden in case of a mass exodus from Hong Kong?
At this point, no one can be sure what the government of China will be like in 1997, when Britain leaves Hong Kong. But a nation that sent a task force to the South Atlantic to defend the rights of a mere 1,800 Britons must do more than just abandon three-million of its citizens to an uncertain and unprotected fate in a former colony.