Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten, speaking in Vancouver, said: "The problem has been pointed out and focused on by Chinese officials and by mainland businessmen themselves. " The problem, he said, is "dealing with officials in the Chinese bureaucracy who are used to controlling things, dealing with officials who aren't perhaps as aware as they should be of the promises of autonomy that have been made to Hong Kong."
Even as Patten spoke, Beijing was demanding that it has the right to decide which journalists could come to Hong Kong for the hangover ceremony. More than 2,200 reporters and camera crewmen have already registered to cover the event, according to the Hong Kong government, and some estimates say the number will exceed 6,000.
Hotel rooms for the date had long been sold out as visitors seek a front-row seat at a genuine historic watershed. It marks the first change in control in which Western democracies have cooperated in handing more than six million people over to communist control without benefit of a vote.
In a speech to journalists on May 3, 1997, World Press Freedom Day, Hong Kong legislator and former journalist Emily Lau urged the media to continue reporting on Hong Kong and not let it slip from the world's attention, particularly as Beijing exerts pressure on the press.
I showed up on time for an interview with Martin Lee at his office in the Admiralty building, not far from Hong Kong's center. "You're 30 minutes late," he charged. "I've got a schedule to keep, I've got important things to do."
I can't say I've never been late for an interview appointment but in this case it was Lee's Cantonese assistant who got mixed up and told my Japanese researcher the wrong time.
The important thing is that we were able to meet and I was able to sample the personality of this man who gives Beijing fits.
Martin Lee, the Hong Kong lawyer and legislator who sharply criticized Beijing's plan to disband the elected legislative council, told me in that 1994 interview: "We must fight for the Hong Kong we have built and the lifestyle we have developed here. The British won't fight for us. We must fight for freedom and democracy ourselves."
Lee urged Hong Kong journalists and the foreign press to keep up the fight against censorship after the handover: "Governor Patten will be in London after July 1, 1997. I may be in jail. But freedoms of speech and the press must be fought for to show Mainland China we insist they keep their promises."
