However, three years later Mr. Deng qualified himself in an address to Basic Law drafters. He said, "Don't ever think that everything would be all right if Hong Kong affairs were administered solely by Hong Kong people while the Central Government had nothing to do with the matter. That simply wouldn't work - it's not a realistic idea. The Central Government certainly will not intervene in the day-to-day affairs of the Special Administrative Region, nor is it necessary. But it isn't possible that something could happen in the region that jeopardizes the fundamental interest of the country".
Deng went further, saying, "You should also consider a few other things. For example, after 1997 we shall still allow people in Hong Kong to attack the Chinese Communist Party and China verbally, but what if they should turn their words into action, trying to convert Hong Kong into a base of opposition to the mainland under the pretext of "democracy"? Then we should have no choice but to intervene."
The list of members of the PC is truly a list of the favored in the new order. As ever, it was dominated by big-league businessmen. All members of the original Group of 44 advisers, pile, serving as vice-chairmen, were Tung Chee-Hwa, Leung Chun-Ying, Simon Li, Henry Fok and the "very frail" as described by Stove Vines, Shanghainese tycoon Ann Tse-Kai, my old friend. They were joined by five of China's top Hong Kong policy-makers, headed by Vice-Premier Qian Qichen. The business line-up was wholly predictable, mixing the truly rich such as Li Ka-Shing, Lee Shau Kee and Walter Kwok with the modestly rich (by Hong Kong standards, which means very rich by most other standards) but politically active such as Paul Cheng, Peter Woo, Vincent Lo and David Chu, all of whom were prepared to go out and promote the virtues of the new order.
Yet another perspective on freedom of the press in Hong Kong came from feisty Derek Davies, whose criticisms of the Americans could be caustic. He was editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in what could be described as its "glory days" as a "writer's publication." He was later Editor-in-Residence at the East-West Center, Honolulu:
"It should not be forgotten that, for many years, Hong Kong had the freest press in the whole region. Even the Japanese press went in for a curious process of self censorship, eschewing news, which did not fit Japan's self-image.
"It was Hong Kong, followed some years later by Singapore and Taiwan, which showed how the Chinese, far from being strangled by Confucian inhibitions as some once thought, could prosper and lead the way into the modern world.
