It is true, as some like former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew have argued, that before Gov. Chris Patten introduced modest democracy to Hong Kong, the people were free and "the rule of law" was doing relatively well.
Our freedoms may hae been protected by law in Hong Kong all those years, but it was no thanks to the local colonial administration. Rather rights and contracts were guaranteed by a democratically elected parliament 8,000 miles away in Great Britain.Lee Kuan Yew and other critics would be right if the Chinese government was also democratically elected. But it isn't. Certainly no one believes that the National People's Congress - a rubber-stamp legislature for the communist Party leadership - will act to preserve rights of people in Hong Kong any more than in China.
Under British rule, at the end of the day we knew that democracy stood behind our liberties. In general, democratic elections are the guarantee of freedom because any party that passes repressive laws will surely be turned out in the next election. And if they do pass a bad law, a supreme court could rule it against the constitution.
When the British are gone and the Chinese arrive, that will be all over with. The Chinese have announced an appointed legislature for Hong Kong that will supplant the one we democratically elected. And this despite the Chinese Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 that "the legislature of the Hong Kong administrative region shall be constituted by elections."
Moreover, the National People's Congress has already declared null-and-void key sections of our Bill of Rights Ordinance, which would have enabled the Hong Kong courts to strike down any repressive laws passed by the appointed legislature.
After June 30, the courts will be obliged, just as in Hi6tler's Germany, to carry out the laws no matter how repressive they may be.
The basis of the return of Hong Kong to China in the 1984 Joint Declaration was "one country, two systems" - meaning that China would not interfere with Hong Kong's system and way of life.
Instead of autonomy for us, China now wants a high degree of control. They want "one country, one system." And they will get it unless the rest of the world impresses upon the Chinese leadership that if they breach their 1984 agreement, as they have already given every indication they intend to do, they cannot be trusted to keep any international agreement, including that which governs the World Trade Organization to which they so desperately seek access.