The agreement with China was signed by Thatcher. That's long ago, mid-1980s. At the time, they were naively certain that increased economic liberalization and increased market economic activity in China would lead to political freedom as well. (Same about 1990s Russia: the west hoped a new economic system would lead to political freedom. Wishful thinking?)
> they were naively certain that increased economic liberalization and increased market economic activity in China would lead to political freedom as well.
Thatcher was a lot of things but naive certainly wasn't one of them. The Western powers simply wanted to become closer to China for economic and geopolitical reasons, but need an excuse to back away from the Red Scare. "Bringing Democracy" is the oldest page of the manufacturing consent playbook. It's honestly embarrassing of how well it works (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya).
I think the real story was that China would take Hong Kong by force if there was no agreement, and by agreeing to a peaceful transfer Thatcher could make the transition more civilized.
Looking back, I think it worked quite well for as long as it did.
Deng Xiaoping famously told Thatcher that China could take Hong Kong in a day when Thatcher tried to work out how the UK can hang onto HK island (HK island was signed over to the UK in perpetuity while other parts of HK was a 99 years lease, IIRC). I think Thatcher did make the most of a weak hand. HK is definitely better off in a peaceful hand over than China taking it by force. I think a lot of us former Hong Kongers wished the autonomy had endured at least for the 50 years that was promised but we also knew there was no force behind that promise.
I also don't fault the British too much for a lack of true democracy after I read the unclassified diplomatic cables re: what Zhou Enlai said about taking 'positive action' (ie: invasion) if HK ever got self-rule, at least we got 1-man-1-vote. It sucks, but the British couldn't even defend Singapore from the Japanese.
I'd be curious to know what the Americans thought about all this. In a parallel universe it's part of the American sphere of influence, like Taiwan. A better universe.
I seem to remember some musings in 80s about a "Greater China" that unified Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore into confederation. Probably a pipe dream but interesting idea.
Including Singapore in that list is unusual. Singapore is not culturally East Asian, despite having a majority Chinese population. Unlike Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan, it also has no history as a Chinese territory.
Also not known to most is that Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the US all have larger Chinese populations than Singapore.
(though this seems a little focused on export controls)
but I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in whatever meetings American diplomats had with one another and with the various other parties (Hong Kong, China, and Britain).
It sounds like the US was pretty hands-off at the time, though. Maybe that's just the official position, but it's surprising. I suppose 90s optimism could have caused this behavior...
Now I imagine what would have happened instead, say, under an Eisenhower administration, with John Foster Dulles as secretary of state.... It's hard to say: They were much more aggressive (e.g. Iran, Korea, ...), but they were also trying to get the British out of places (the Suez Crisis, the subtext of The Quiet American, ...). At this point it all just becomes alternate history though...
Practically, Britain should just offer citizenship to Hong Kongers...
I wish there were freedom of movement within AUKUS + ASEAN (+ OAS?), as a block, like there is within the EU... Instead it's almost like the neo-empire has hukous. Which sucks. Just come out as an empire and let subjects get some benefits, like the freedom to live anywhere... Or, I don't know, maybe that would just result in Americanization of the world, which would be kind of tragic... Hmm... Well anyway, at least invite Hong Kongers in; it's the least you can do...
Hm, actually CUKCs used to be a thing (unfortunate acronym now in 2022):
(Sounds like the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 should be repealed.)
Maybe this can all just be done in a bilateral way instead... Problem is, western countries have no incentive to bargain for looser visa regulations that let their people leave...
Still, it's nice to imagine a world where a person from Hong Kong or London or New York could freely move to any of the other cities...
Hm, maybe the collapse of national legitimacy and the rise of sanctuary cities (somewhat overhyped) paired with something more prosaic like sister cities could do this... Why can't a mayor have a foreign policy? Eric Adams or Sadiq Khan: "Hong Kongers are welcome here!" Hm...
How would such a league of city-states defend itself though? I mean, this is the problem in Hong Kong to begin with...
Hm...
Maybe we just need Mr. Lee's franchises... Make it real, people... If Mark Zuckerberg can get 15,000 engineers to try to build the Metaverse, surely we can raise an army to construct good things from cyberpunk...
> Practically, Britain should just offer citizenship to Hong Kongers...
Well, if the UK wanted to, they would have done it before 1997 but they chose to give the majority a chance to apply for a BNO passport which was literally a slap in the face. No right to live and work in the UK when you are a 'British National Overseas'.
Even when they let BNO passport holders apply for the right to live and work in the UK recently, they could pick and choose who they wanted to let in.
Not only that but the UK in the 80’s had no choice. There was no way the UK could project power to actually keep HK or force China to follow the agreement.
I would regard it more as a “pull out” than anything. Set up HK the best you can than wash your hands of it.
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but it also worked in several cases! South Korea was a high-profile success of this strategy, for instance, with a successful transition to democracy in the 90s.
This is kind of memory-holed, possibly because South Korea was a US ally long before it was a democracy, and "west aligned" tended to trump "democratic" a lot.
West-aligned still trumps democratic. The West generally doesn't have a problem with authoritarianism but rather with competition or obstruction of their economic goals. When the opposite is true they will gladly turn a blind eye to any number of atrocities.
See here: Saudi-Arabia, Oman, UAE, Philippines, Egypt (military junta), Turkey, etc.
If being friendly with an authoritarian state yields economic or military geographical advantage then that overrides any ideological hang-ups involved.
Brought about by a very bloody decade-long struggle for democracy led by student activists. That transition to democracy in Korea was written and paid for in blood. Successful? Yes. With high costs? Also yes. And they’re still dealing with the fallout.
I wouldn’t say it’s a huge success because South Korea and the United States are still spending a lot to keep others away from interfering with their Democracy. Without huge military spending, cybersecurity, and education, it can quickly get influenced by China or attacked by North Korea.
Also Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, and much of Latin America had capitalist dictatorships before democracy. But I don't think it was free markets that led to democracy in those cases so much as it was US political influence.
The US overthrew the democratic government of Sukarno and killed up to 3 million Indonesians funding the terrorist movements and proxy wars till the US backed military took over as “saviors”. The CIA considered this a successful playbook and named it as the Jakarta Method.
They attack democracies that they don’t like labeling them autocratic and dictatorships. Then install their military juntas. See numerous examples like Chile, Ethiopia, Iran etc.
Stephen Kinzer has written extensively on this in the book Overthrow:
After reading a bit about the issue, I think it's not accurate to describe Sukarno's government as "democratic", though clearly it was far less oppressive than Suharto's US-backed military dictatorship.
Yes, different variations of that also happened throughout much of South and Central America. They installed capitalist dictatorships to open the countries' markets to US products and establish capitalism, then (in many cases, though obviously not in Iran) pressured those dictatorships to cede power to democracy. I don't think capitalism alone would have destabilized dictatorship as a form of government.
It was a combination of pressure from above and below: US pressure, but also a newly middle-class population starting to raise hell. In most of those countries, protests and civil unrest presaged the transition to democracy--and suppressing it would cost the government their US support, so the easiest thing to do was to just give in.
Sorry, but in Latin America, US pressure was to create the dictatorships, not to remove them. US helped to create them, and supported the torture and chasing of dissidents.
They did, yes, and then (as ertian described) they also exerted pressure to get the dictatorships to hold democratic elections, as long as that wouldn't imperil US access to markets.
Sure, in some countries and time periods. I'm not in any way saying the US has a flawless record. I'm just saying that US pressure was not the only reason why countries transitioned to democracy: it was a combination of popular and international (largely US) pressure. When one or the other was missing, the transition generally never happened.
I'm confused about Indonesia ("reformasi"). You wrote <<US political influence>>. Can you explain how this worked in the context of Indonesia? As I understand, one of the major catalysts of Indonesian democratic reform was the Asian currency crisis.
Naive or not, there wasn't really an alternative for Britain anyway. China had made it clear that they wanted HK back, and would get it back one way or the other. The best they could do was sign an agreement that offered as much protection to the city for as long as possible and then hope things would change in China over time.
So China was too powerful to ignore their threats? Even today don't you think there is an alternative to handing stuff over to threats of military violence?
In your view how is it different from today's situation where China might declare the same thing about Taiwan?
There are a couple things that make the Hong Kong situation more complicated.
* by 1997 (handover date) Britain lacked a colonial empire from which it could assist in a defense of Hong Kong, and of the overseas posts it did have, the regiments were fairly small. Sending a large military force all the way from Britain itself would take too long in any sort of conflict. Taiwan has always come with the implicit security guarantee of the United States, which maintains a very active presence in the Pacific.
* the PLA has the law of numbers on their side, not only due to part 1 but because of how large their army is in general, and the border between Hong Kong and the rest of China is a fairly small river. The PLA generally lacks the amphibious capacity to do a land invasion of Taiwan.
* the New Territories in Hong Kong, unlike the rest of it, were signed over in a 99 year lease. 1997 was the end of those 99 years. The New Territories are a mountainous area with a good deal of Hong Kong's postwar population and also its major water supplies; without it and bordering a hostile China, Hong Kong would quickly cease to be a functioning city. Holding onto the territories wouldn't last a very long time due to parts 1 and 2, and unlike Taiwan where international law depends on who you think China is, the UK would clearly be in the wrong by violating the 99 year lease unilaterally.
>Even today don't you think there is an alternative to handing stuff over to threats of military violence?
The alternative is war.
>today's situation where China might declare the same thing about Taiwan?
And everyone pretty much agrees the alternative is war.
Calling for war in times of peace from your couch is a very easy thing do; but it's not something to be taken lightly. There's no telling how quickly this appetite for war against our 3rd largest trading partner will dry up once we start having to deal with the economic fallout.
In Russia, it actually did that in the 90s, but it lasted for less that a decade.
A big part of it is that the "democrats" (which was a catch-all term for all Western-minded liberals) favored a quick reset of the vestigial planned economy into a free market-based one; words like "shock therapy" were thrown around. The idea was that any inconveniences would be temporary, and more than made up for when the transition is complete.
The immediate result, however, was a significant drop in quality of life for the majority of the population, with a corresponding rise in crime. And because the "democrats" were the ones spearheading the efforts, they carried the reputational hit. This gave people like Putin the opportunity to ride to power on "strong hand" policies that were supposed to fix all that.
I grew up in Russia during that era, and remember the rhetoric then. One thing I'd say the West did very wrong was to let organizations like the IMF run wild, pushing for their (austerity-centric) ideological view of the economy through loans. Then again, from what I've read later, it wouldn't be the first or the last time they messed up a country they were supposed to help.
The baffling thing to me is how anyone thought rapid privatization was a good idea. Going from an economic system where the only way to become personally wealthy is via crime and corruption to auctioning off a country's core infrastructure can only lead to criminals ending up absurdly rich.
Keep in mind that those people were coming from late Soviet stagnation with empty shelves and shoddy quality for anything that was available. One of the ideas floated around at the time is that, because all property in the country was everyone's, it was, in practice, no-one's; people stole what they could, and didn't care if something was a waste. So, the theory went, what you need is owners with vested interest in that property, to put it to good use and avoid waste.
Like all simple economic theories, it looked good on paper, and convincing to the crowd. Then it turned out that the new owners were largely the same people who were in charge in Soviet days, except for a few talented and lucky grifters who made their way from the very bottom to the very top.
It was a good idea in that it made a lot of people very very rich. Some folks such as the Clinton's got their fingers in both the Russian pie as well as other minor ones (in terms of wealth extracted, not effect) like Haiti.
Its been awhile since I've read up on that part of Russia, so I could very well be wrong. But it seemed like Russia was doomed from the beginning because almost at the onset, control was pretty much consolidated into Oligarchs.
It was true, but the oligarchs back then didn't constitute a single ruling party. It was more like Ukraine in 2000-10s, where you had several guys who are jockeying for power, controlling various political parties to contest elections, owning mass media outlets for propaganda etc. It's not your typical ordered Western liberal democracy, but at least so long as they fight, they have to pander to the people, occasionally; and the media, while not truly free, is sufficiently diverse to produce some semblance of truth in aggregate.
(Side note: Zelensky's "Servant of the People" is available on Netflix with decent subtitles, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone in the West who wants to understand the historical trajectory of former Soviet republics - Russia and Belarus especially, of course. What I found interesting is that, while it was targeted at contemporary Ukrainians in 2015-2019, the world that it depicts was very familiar to me from my memories of 1990s in Russia, aside from uniquely local issues like the languages.)
The difference is that one of Russian oligarchs decided to make a new political puppet with a "strong man" image. He was very successful, but then the puppet decided that it can make it on its own - and did so.
China was already experimenting with capitalism since the late 70s- and China had a diaspora from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore to help them.
Russia had nothing.
Totally agree. It would've been much smarter to allow Russia to slowly transition into Democratic Socialism or something like that (whatever the Russian people voted for), with critical industries retained by the state and a welfare system kept in place.
The experience in de-communisting Russia was also a key reason why China chose to liberalize only their economy, while keeping a firm one party grip on political power.
What happened to Russia post "liberalization" in the 90s was very influential on Chinese elite's views on liberalizing. Russia basically got shafted and fed on by a combination of politicians & Western consultants.
It surely feels like dark times, but it's even darker now when democracy in the US is under threat. Belief in democracy abroad or at home seems to have gone away and in its place there is cynicism, implicit "might makes right" and political tribalism.
> Same about 1990s Russia: the west hoped a new economic system would lead to political freedom. Wishful thinking?
> The exact same kind of thinking the led US to invade Irak.
Encouraging (maybe there's a better word to use) a different way of running a foreign economy to bring about political change is not the exact same kind of thinking as overthrowing a foreign government to bring about political change. Yeah, there is the belief that political change needs to happen, but in practice these things are very different.
Doesn't feel like that long ago since that same line of thinking is still applied to China today. Read enough and you'll be convinced of the imminent collapse of China any day now.
> Read enough and you'll be convinced of the imminent collapse of China any day now.
Those arguments always sound like straw men though: they are designed because they are easy to tear down. China is...weird. You can't really take anything at face value, good or bad. And I say that having lived there for 9 years. E.g. sometimes a ghost mall or district is one waiting to be populated, otherwise times it's just waiting to be torn down (either way positive GDP is generated).
They'll be wrong until the moment they're right. The USSR looked similarly durable in the 1980s, and the few voices saying it was rotten at the core and on the verge of collapse were waved off.
I had first hand reports from the field in the 1980's that the soviet union was falling apart socially and economically. Friend was a Russian studies major, spent two years in the soviet union. Another friend also spent six months there. And one of the board members of my old old company was in the oil and gas business and traveled to Russian a lot.
What political freedom have markets provides the west except in the form of wishful thinking?
The US is getting more fascist in observable ways. Suspension habeas corpus in GWs time, pepper spraying college students in 2008 for a seated protest in Cali, to no abortion rights, and the political snowflakes in both parties calling for each other’s heads, kids in cages and yet everyone tucks their chin and goes on, inequality and taxation without holistic demographic representation; SCOTUS Justices openly demanding the public just accept things it does not like.
Keep complaining about Russia and China, USians. Virtue signaling while actually operating as moral relativists is creating the culture you talk to be against in your own backyard.
Thatcher was dealt a bad hand. When the British wanted Hong Kong they in their Western mindset considered that "99 years" was the same as "forever".
Consider that the UK only barely managed to defend the Falklands.
Thatcher saved her and her country's face in the negotiations which is the main job of any politician.
She also thought by closing out heavy industry she could break the unions. And then companies would open new factories in Britain out competing Europe on labor costs.
Wishful thinking, but common at the time. Gorbachev had the same aspirations when it came to communism spreading from Russia to other countries. Of course the West had other plans. In retrospect I think the failure wrt China is that the integration didn't go far enough, most likely because China started to threaten the economic hegemony of the U.S.
Western countries have been complicit specially the US in derailing many democracies for it own purposes. HongKong plight is just the excuse needed to malign China they dont really give a f*k about peoples freedom or democracy case in point current Pakistan causi military take over of a democratic government with support from US. Or the turning a blind eye to growing fascism in India but as long as its a country they can use against China it is okay. It is okay to support fascist kings and generals as long as they tow your line otherwise they are unacceptable and those countries need democracies. But democracies that do not toe your line need to be destroyed.
