The Lady Who Lost Hong Kong
By Chip Tsao | published May 14, 2009
As a strong leader, Margaret Thatcher not only overshadows most of her predecessors, but, by virtue of the commencement date of her prime ministership, she also eclipses the anniversary of the May 4th Movement, a violent student demonstration in Peking in 1919 calling for democracy and protesting government corruption—an event still hailed, with some wishful thinking, by many Chinese intellectuals as China’s enlightenment, but all but forgotten by the rest of the world.
May 4 is remembered instead for Mrs. Thatcher coming to power in 1979, a watershed in world history. She changed the social fabric of Britain. With her imperial blue dress, her hawkish, penetrating eyes, and her unimpressive middle-class handbag from Marks and Spencer, the Iron Lady destroyed trade unions, enabled millions to buy their own homes, rekindled the spirit of the market economy, and won a naval war.
I remember the old days when I first arrived in Britain in the late 1970s. Old Labour had failed the economy and Britain seemed to be in its death throes. Rubbish had piled up in Picadilly Circus, the railway was paralyzed by strikes, and there were reports that dead bodies were not being collected and instead dumped on the streets. London seemed more like Moscow or East Berlin during the Cold War. “An old man in the closed-down market, kicking up the paper with his worn-out shoes,” Britain was governed by a dark gallery of haggard ghouls, and a gaggle of old pale-faced Marxists. Not many people these days remember names like Foreign Secretary Denis Healy, Home Secretary Roy Hattersley and Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. They were the people who had transformed the lyrics of the pop song “Streets of London” into a grim reality.
Margaret Thatcher changed all of this. She made herself a role model for what is understood today as political leadership. She hated words like “consensus” and “divisiveness.” With a democratic mandate, she knew there was no time to seek “consensus” among the people. Her charisma both charmed and provoked, offending from time to time and leading people to either see her as a Messiah or a plague. There was no three-month “consultation period” with the public before she decided to invade the Falklands, a move guided half by her gut feelings and half out of patriotism. I am lucky to have spent the prime years of my life witnessing this change.
Among all of her achievements, there is a tiny flaw. An arrogant Thatcher raised the issue of the Hong Kong treaties with Deng Xiaoping in the hopes of renewing the glory of the British Empire in the Far East. Had she been better advised, she would have known that face counts more than anything in communist China. Someone in Hong Kong who understood the Chinese psyche better had suggested that she was best off pretending the treaties didn’t exist, which the Chinese never recognized anyway, and the status quo would have been allowed to straddle over the 1997 deadline. But the law-abiding lady refused to muddle it through, which is sometimes an art in and of itself in politics. It soon became a mistake she regretted. And the rest, as we are all sadly aware, is history.
As a strong leader, Margaret Thatcher not only overshadows most of her predecessors, but, by virtue of the commencement date of her prime ministership, she also eclipses the anniversary of the May 4th Movement, a violent student demonstration in Peking in 1919 calling for democracy and protesting government corruption—an event still hailed, with some wishful thinking, by many Chinese intellectuals as China’s enlightenment, but all but forgotten by the rest of the world.
May 4 is remembered instead for Mrs. Thatcher coming to power in 1979, a watershed in world history. She changed the social fabric of Britain. With her imperial blue dress, her hawkish, penetrating eyes, and her unimpressive middle-class handbag from Marks and Spencer, the Iron Lady destroyed trade unions, enabled millions to buy their own homes, rekindled the spirit of the market economy, and won a naval war.
I remember the old days when I first arrived in Britain in the late 1970s. Old Labour had failed the economy and Britain seemed to be in its death throes. Rubbish had piled up in Picadilly Circus, the railway was paralyzed by strikes, and there were reports that dead bodies were not being collected and instead dumped on the streets. London seemed more like Moscow or East Berlin during the Cold War. “An old man in the closed-down market, kicking up the paper with his worn-out shoes,” Britain was governed by a dark gallery of haggard ghouls, and a gaggle of old pale-faced Marxists. Not many people these days remember names like Foreign Secretary Denis Healy, Home Secretary Roy Hattersley and Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. They were the people who had transformed the lyrics of the pop song “Streets of London” into a grim reality.
Margaret Thatcher changed all of this. She made herself a role model for what is understood today as political leadership. She hated words like “consensus” and “divisiveness.” With a democratic mandate, she knew there was no time to seek “consensus” among the people. Her charisma both charmed and provoked, offending from time to time and leading people to either see her as a Messiah or a plague. There was no three-month “consultation period” with the public before she decided to invade the Falklands, a move guided half by her gut feelings and half out of patriotism. I am lucky to have spent the prime years of my life witnessing this change.
Among all of her achievements, there is a tiny flaw. An arrogant Thatcher raised the issue of the Hong Kong treaties with Deng Xiaoping in the hopes of renewing the glory of the British Empire in the Far East. Had she been better advised, she would have known that face counts more than anything in communist China. Someone in Hong Kong who understood the Chinese psyche better had suggested that she was best off pretending the treaties didn’t exist, which the Chinese never recognized anyway, and the status quo would have been allowed to straddle over the 1997 deadline. But the law-abiding lady refused to muddle it through, which is sometimes an art in and of itself in politics. It soon became a mistake she regretted. And the rest, as we are all sadly aware, is history.
Labels: Politically Incorrect, 陶傑
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