Summary
Symposium: Hong Kong's Reintegration into the People's Republic of China - Panel Discussion
See the full content of this document
Extract
Roundtable discussion.
Ms. Laurelyn Douglas:(*****) I want to welcome back our distinguished panelists and welcome you to the roundtable, which we hope will be an informal opportunity to ask questions and review some of the issues presented during the sessions yesterday. I also encourage students who might be participating in research on this topic to speak up.
Professor Harold G. Maier: This is going to be informal, and that's the best thing about sessions like this. I'll help us get started, but I expect the discussion will soon carry itself. Those of you who were here for yesterday's sessions may recall that I suggested what we are discussing is something that is almost purely speculative during this symposium. We certainly know something of the history of the past. But even that, I think, is not as well understood, at least in the United States and, perhaps in the Western Hemisphere in general, as it could be. But what we are trying to do in this meeting is to predict what Hong Kong is going to become. One thing of which we can be fairly confident is that we can't know now what Hong Kong will become. Yet speculating is often worthwhile, and so this morning I've asked Peter [Wesley-Smith]--and I gave him two minutes' warning--to continue what he had done at the outset of yesterday's sessions. You'll remember that he described a history of the relationship among Hong Kong, various treaties, and what is now the People's Republic of China (hereinafter P.R.C.). I've asked Peter if he would be willing to begin today's session by giving a projection of what he sees as the future of Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China for the next twenty to twenty-five years. I expect the other panelists will get started from that, and then we'll get audience members involved as well. Professor Peter Wesley-Smith: I think the first thing to say is that a historian should never try to predict the future. I think the usual assumption by most people is that Hong Kong in terms of internal politics and domestic legal affairs will become very much like Singapore. For those who know Singapore, this might be a rather distressing prognostication. Singapore, of course, is in some sense formally a democratic system, but in practice is not democratic at all. It has a very tough government and is a "rugged society," where the leaders of the People's Action Party suppress dissent in a very repressive manner and use the legal system to achieve such ends. And I think the Chinese government has been very impressed with the Singapore model. They were very impressed with the Hong Kong colonial model. And, indeed, when they started off talking and thinking about the future of Hong Kong, what they initially intended to do was to simply cross out the "United Kingdom" where it appeared and replace it with the "People's Republic of China." The appeal of the Hong Kong model to the P.R.C. is that Hong Kong had a system which guaranteed imperial authority, with virtually no democratic institutions at all, or any limitation upon the autocratic executive power of the Hong Kong government. But that wasn't possible as it turned out. The Basic Law is a much more liberal document. But I think the P.R.C. is intending that the Basic Law be administered as far as possible in an autocratic fashion so that Hong Kong will continue to be a hot-bed of inequities and perform its role in business and international trade, not only for its internal benefit but for the benefit of China. But Hong Kong won't in any sense become genuinely democratic. There will be some slight democratization as time goes on, but very, very little, with much the same kind of attitude towards human rights. The one point which I didn't think was made adequately yesterday wa...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
