Hong Kong’s future
Sir: So we have a moral duty to protect the people of Hong Kong and guide them back to the golden world which existed before 1997 under British rule (‘Let them come’, 6 June)? Come off it. It is true that the hope behind the 1984 Joint Declaration was for HK to move gradually to stronger democratic forms, although under the direct authority of the government of the PRC, as it had been with the UK.
What has destabilised Hong Kong and alarmed Beijing is digital grass-roots empowerment — the same thing that half the world’s governments are facing. In Hong Kong it appears in a particularly virulent form. The Chinese have their own way of trying to police it. Other countries have theirs; the Americans are not doing too well at present, nor are the French. Here the police do their best.
The vision of the 1984 Joint Declaration was of a laboratory of cooperation between two great powers.
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