Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-25-Speech-3-192"
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"en.20001025.7.3-192"2
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"Mr President, I would also like to congratulate Mr Cushnahan on his report. I should like to thank him for once again being so adaptable in writing that report and being prepared to involve his colleagues so that there is no need for us to go through a lengthy amendment procedure because we reached consensus when the report was being drawn up.
Once again we see the handover of power in Hong Kong has generally gone very well and has defeated some of the more pessimistic forecasts. Clearly, demonstrations still take place on a weekly basis in Hong Kong, movements are permitted in Hong Kong which are not permitted in China, the economy has survived a difficult period and continues to thrive and, as Mr De Clercq has said, the WTO membership for China should actually be an opportunity for Hong Kong, given its tremendous power in financial services in particular, and given that much of Hong Kong manufacturing has already moved to China.
However, as Mr Cushnahan has pointed out, there are areas of concern and they are set out well in his report so I do not need to go through them. But I may quote one or two examples. The Chinese news agency telling Mrs Anson Chan and the civil servants they had to better support the Chief Executive seems to me like interference in the affairs of another country. The various reports of businessmen being put under pressure not to trade with Taiwan is also cause for concern. The recent sacking or movement of one of the directors of Radio Television Hong Kong appears to have been as a result of pressure from the mainland.
All of these things in themselves may not add up to a great deal because they are part of a normal power struggle that you would see, provided, that is, that what Hong Kong was based on was a thriving, democratic system that could resist those sorts of pressures. But we have to be concerned that in Hong Kong democracy is not going the way that we would have liked. We have already heard of the unfair nature of the election system.
We will note, as was pointed out recently in the
by an adviser to the former Governor, the extent to which the rules were pushed back in 1997. But when you see someone like Christine Loh resigning because there is no point in being in the legislative any more that, to me, is a significant signal that things are not going well. And when someone who works for the Chief Executive is accused of interfering in opinion polls, that also bodes ill for the future. It is not just a question of point scoring, a lot of modernisation is needed in Hong Kong. That will only come about if there is a consensus and the top-down government in Hong Kong at the moment is ill-equipped to build consensus within Hong Kong. While we recognise there has been a smooth transition, there remain areas we have to watch. I would hope that we can continue with these annual reports and these Parliament reports so that we can monitor very closely the situation in Hong Kong."@en1
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