This is one of the most iconic points of China's rise. I've often heard old timers talk about it but never looked it up until now.
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Date was late September 1982. Margaret Thatcher was in China to renegotiate the lease of Hong Kong. Still smarting from the Falklands war victory, she strode into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen to meet with Deng Xiaoping.
Deng XP's position was unmovable. China was not Argentina and HK was not the Falklands. HK will be returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Thatcher walked out of the negotiation flustered, and tripped in front of world media.
Below is an account from The Independent:
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Date was late September 1982. Margaret Thatcher was in China to renegotiate the lease of Hong Kong. Still smarting from the Falklands war victory, she strode into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen to meet with Deng Xiaoping.
Deng XP's position was unmovable. China was not Argentina and HK was not the Falklands. HK will be returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
Thatcher walked out of the negotiation flustered, and tripped in front of world media.
Below is an account from The Independent:
AT THE Great Hall of the People that morning, Deng was flanked by Huang Hua, his foreign affairs minister, Zhang Wenjin, vice-minister, and Ke Hua, ambassador to London. Arrayed to Deng's right were Thatcher, Youde, Butler and Cradock; in the foreground, an enamel spittoon of which Deng made frequent use. 'There has been a lively debate going on for years,' reflected one diplomat, 'about whether Deng's habit of spitting into spittoons while receiving visitors is done for effect, or whether he really is a vulgar old bugger who cannot kick the habit.'
Deng was blunt. China, he said: '. . . cannot but resume the exercise of sovereignty over the whole of the Hong Kong area in 1997. Upon such resumption, the Chinese government will take into full consideration the territory's special circumstances and adopt special policies in order to maintain the prosperity of Hong Kong.'
China, in other words, was determined to take back the whole of Hong Kong; and it felt no need of Britain's blessing to do so.
This, for Thatcher - and for Hong Kong - was a decisive moment. Deng had issued an ultimatum, which must be rejected or accepted. Thatcher could reject the ultimatum by replying that, legally, Britain held the high ground. It possessed a sovereignty over Hong Kong which it could choose to yield, or not, depending on what other arrangements might be reached with China.
Alternatively, she could choose the way of conciliation. She could acknowledge here and now that China's claim to sovereignty could not be resisted, and hope by doing so to create an atmosphere of co-operation in which China might reasonably be expected to offer concessions on administration much more readily than it would through adversarial negotiation.
Conciliation would have been the more apparently logical course, since both sides knew perfectly well that Britain could not remain in the ceded areas of Hong Kong after 1997 without China's co-operation. In practical terms, the treaties were worthless, sovereignty would be China's in due course, and any row about it would certainly damage Hong Kong in the short term whatever the eventual outcome.
But there were, for Thatcher, other and more acute considerations. However sound the reasoning, it would be politically intolerable for her to be seen to give in to the diktat of a Communist power. She defended the remnants and virtues of Empire more fiercely than any prime minister since Churchill: if a yielding of Hong Kong was inevitable, she must none the less be seen to fight against it.
There was an element of demagoguery here, but other considerations pulled in the same direction. If Thatcher's government was to 'sell' to Hong Kong - and to the British parliament - a 1997 deal which involved a transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong to China, then Hong Kong and parliament would have to be persuaded that this was the best agreement that Britain could possibly have secured. It would be essential to make Chinese intransigence a matter of public record. Better, for these reasons, to start a fight and - if necessary - to lose it, than pre-emptively to surrender sovereignty and leave Hong Kong a hostage to China's generosity.
Thatcher stood her ground. Hong Kong, she duly told Deng, was British by virtue of three treaties which were valid in international law, two of which were cessions. These were substantial obligations. China could not simply disregard them. If it wanted to resume the whole of Hong Kong, the only way in which it could legally do so would be through varying the terms of the existing treaties, by agreement with Britain.
Thatcher understood the 'importance' of the 'sovereignty issue' to China, she told Deng. But Britain's primary concern was that an administration should remain in place in Hong Kong after 1997, capable of maintaining the 'stability and prosperity' of the territory. She was dismissive of the Chinese scheme to resume sovereignty over Hong Kong and then allow it to function as a capitalist enclave under Chinese rule: it was imaginative, but it was untested, unproven.
Only continued British administration - British 'rule', she said - could guarantee Hong Kong's well-being beyond 1997.
It was only then did Thatcher hint at her proposed bargain. If, she said, a 'satisfactory' agreement could be reached on administration, the nature of which she had already made clear, then she would 'consider making recommendations tothe British parliament' on the issue of sovereignty over Hong Kong. But agreement on administration must come first. For the time being, she concluded, the two countries should pursue discussions at a diplomatic level.
This, visibly, was not what Deng had expected, as he shuffled irritably in his chair. Not since the normalisation of Sino-British relations in 1972 had any British minister directly rejected China's claim to Hong Kong. Yet now, a decade later, a British prime minister was turning back the clock, and speaking - as China heard it - the language of 19th-century imperialism, defending the spoils of the Opium Wars and thrusting back into China's face its past weakness and shame. Deng's assertiveness gave way to outright anger. His immediate muttered comments were lost to the British record, but appeared to include the remark that Thatcher should be 'bombarded' out of her obstinacy.
Deng returned to the offensive by repeating his rejection of continued British rule in more categorical terms. If he agreed to let Britain stay in Hong Kong beyond 1997, he said, he would be no better than the traitors of the Qing dynasty who had first yielded Chinese soil to Britain under treaties which were illegal and invalid. He could not do it. China must resume sovereignty over Hong Kong, and sovereignty must include administration. The British flag would have to go. The British governor would have to go. And it would be China alone which decided what policies were 'suitable' for Hong Kong in the future. None the less, he said, China hoped that Britain would 'co-operate' in the transition, and it was prepared to enter into 'discussions' to that end. But it would not be bound by their results. If they failed to produce an agreement acceptable to China within two years, then China would announce its own policies for Hong Kong unilaterally. The meeting was over.
THE BRITISH had not foreseen that the Chinese might choose to fix a deadline to negotiations; and Deng's pre-emptive rejection of both sovereignty and continued British administration had been delivered in terms stronger than expected. But an agreement to negotiate had been reached, and the disaster of a deadlock had been averted. As the principals adjourned for lunch, it was left to Cradock, the British ambassador, and Zhang, the Chinese vice-foreign minister, to set about drafting a communique. Their brief statement showed only slight traces of the cracks over which it had been papered.
It said: 'The leaders of the two countries held far-reaching talks in a friendly atmosphere on the future of Hong Kong. Both leaders made clear their respective positions on the subject. They agreed to enter talks through diplomatic channels following the visit with the common aim of maintaining the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong.'
The communique pleased the British by virtue of its omissions. Though both Deng and Zhao had treated China's sovereignty over Hong Kong as a premise of any further discussion, the communique spoke only of 'respective positions' on the 'future' of Hong Kong. And, since the communique summarised for the record the basis on which the negotiations were to begin, the British could now assert that both sides were approaching the negotiating table without any formal preconditions having been acknowledged - and, in particular, with the British claim to sovereignty over Hong Kong intact, if not unchallenged.
A similar thought struck the Chinese, but somewhat later. At three o'clock that afternoon, when the text of the communique came chattering off the wires of the official New China News Agency, it proved to have gained a coda added unilaterally by China. This said: 'The Chinese government's position on the recovery of the whole region of Hong Kong is unequivocal and known to all.'
The communique appeared while Thatcher was giving her own main press conference of the Peking visit. When a journalist asked her to comment on China's commitment to 'recovery of the whole region of Hong Kong', she was provoked into repeating publicly the position which had so shocked Deng. 'There are three treaties in existence,' she said. 'We stick by our treaties unless we decide on something else. At the moment, we stick by our treaties.'
This was dangerous ground on which to break cover. But the more Thatcher reflected on the cavalier way in which the Chinese leaders were dismissing Britain's rights under international law, the more irritated she became. Enough was enough.
THATCHER'S COLD was wearing her down. Her voice, husky at the start of the press conference, was a croak by the end. Worse, she had lost her footing on the steps leading from the Great Hall of the People down into Tiananmen Square at lunchtime, and had tumbled to her knees before the waiting television cameras. The image which dominated the news in Hong Kong that evening was rich in portent: a British prime minister, in Peking to negotiate the territory's future, kowtowing towards the mausoleum of Chairman Mao Tse-tung at the centre of Tiananmen Square.
When Thatcher hosted her farewell banquet at the Great Hall of the People a few hours later, Zhao was again the only senior leader to attend. The British would undoubtedly have been more sensitive to the snub they were receiving, had they been aware that Deng and all the other Communist grandees had chosen to pass up Thatcher's banquet in favour of another one taking place the same night in the same building, hosted by Kim Il-sung.
