Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said before her death that she was disappointed that she had not been able to persuade former Chinese supreme leader Deng Xiaoping to extend the British lease in Hong Kong.
In 1997, seven years after she left office to see the final chapter of her empire come to an end, Mrs. Thatcher admitted that she was “very sad”. She said in a radio interview, “I want the British government to continue to govern Hong Kong. In his private diary, Prince Charles called the return of Hong Kong “the great Chinese take-away” and said that Chinese diplomats were “shockingly old wax figures.
It was mainly Jardine Matheson and HSBC that insisted on negotiating the Hong Kong lease with China. These two long-established British firms only cared about their own interests, and their leases of land in Hong Kong expired in 1997, without taking the fate of five million Hong Kong citizens into account.
They were all scholars and diplomats, and the system had a long record of admiration for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, with an underlying leftist ideology.
As for Mrs. Thatcher, she hated communism and the Soviet Union, but had no knowledge of China. The China experts in the diplomatic system, though civil servants, were after all human beings, and they did not consider Mrs. Thatcher, who came from a family with a grocer’s store, graduated from Oxford, became a barrister, joined the Conservative Party, and became the Prime Minister after being recognized by Mr. Heath, the elite clique of “China Tonks,” as one of their own.
The subtleties of this relationship were clearly depicted in the comedy TV series Yes Minister: although the Prime Minister was authoritative, the civil servants below the junior minister had a thousand ways to mislead, resist, and trip up the Prime Minister.
Of course, the relationship between Chinatrust and Mrs. Desjardins was not so hostile at that time. But there was another group of people who hated Chinatrust, namely, members of the Executive Council of the Hong Kong colonial government such as Chung and Kan. They were just representatives of the business community, spoke business English with a Cantonese accent, and were as formal as a meeting, but lacked interest. In contrast, the monthly salary of diplomats, following the local establishment of the British government, was much less. The “China Tongues” knew: “No matter how hard we work, we are only perpetuating the interests of the privileged class in your colony. If Hong Kong was broken up, the diplomats retired to the countryside and lived comfortably on their pensions.
At that time, Hong Kong people did not know that there was only one “British side”, and there were already so many layers. Today, when we see Trump’s four years of service, he claimed that he could not command the FBI, but others said that the CIA was also in trouble, so we know that politics and diplomacy are not that simple. The system was already very “advanced” when Dechauer took office, and he did not have to spend the first five years of his tenure to hold on to military power.
The system was already very “advanced”. Obviously, it is a very profound game of chess, but there are many people in Hong Kong who are not that kind of material, but prefer to “engage in politics”, and there is an additional “professional” called KOL, which makes the world even more chaotic.
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