The Recovery of Hong Kong } 601
the Joint Declaration and the Qian-Hurd agreement; he believed there existed
no Sino-British agreement on these matters, and that as sovereign power until
July 1, 1997, Britain was acting fully within its legal rights.
Beijing responded to Patten’s election reform program by demanding that
London abandon its effort to “unilaterally” reform Hong Kong’s prerever-
sion political structures, that is, implementing changes without first securing
Beijing’s approval. The way things should work, Beijing said, was that China
would lay out the parameters for postreversion Hong Kong in a Basic Law,
and Britain should ensure that Hong Kong’s prereversion political structures
were congruent with Basic Law provisions. Such “congruence” would avoid
a rupture between pre- and postreversion arrangements, thereby creating
a “through train” that minimized risk of destabilizing Hong Kong. Unless
Britain changed course, Beijing warned, Sino-British cooperation on the re-
version of Hong Kong would be at an end. When London refused to change
course, Beijing followed through on its threat, suspended cooperation, and
proceeded to pressure London in various ways to accept Beijing’s leadership
of the reversion process. In London, Percy Cradock, then retired, joined in
the criticism of Patten’s approach.
Beijing waged its “negotiation battle” with Britain not on the merits of
more or less democracy in Hong Kong, but on Britain’s putative violation of
“the three agreements,” producing what Beijing called Britain’s “three viola-
tions.” This approach allowed Beijing to occupy the moral high ground. It
was not a question of democracy, Chinese representatives said, but of British
failure to comply with its agreements. This avoided casting China as an oppo-
nent to democracy in a world swept by democratic ideals.
Beijing saw Patten’s reform program as an attempt to create a fait accompli
which would then form a basis for discussions in which China would ad-
vance counterproposals to Patten’s moves. Beijing countered by insisting that
Patten abandon his reform program and “return” to the path of cooperation,
i.e., of action only via agreement of the two sides, as required by the “three
agreements.” In the Joint Declaration, the two parties had “agreed to a proper
negotiated settlement” and had set up a Joint Liaison Group to “ensure a
smooth transfer.” Those provisions required, or at least implied, that Britain
should only act through agreement with Beijing, in China’s view.
Patten believed that none of his reforms violated earlier agreements with
China. According to Patten’s memoir, when the matter of Chinese charges
of British violations of bilateral agreements was submitted to the House of
Commons and “three different teams of international lawyers were asked to
say whether our electoral proposals were a breach of the [Qian-Hurd] cor-
respondence or of the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law, they answered in
the negative.”^55 When Patten flew to Beijing in October 1992 to present his
reform program to Beijing shortly after assuming his post in Hong Kong and
announcing his political reform program, he tried to pin down exactly where