Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 43, October 1984
In the negotiations about the future of Hong Kong, Thatcher soon came to realise that her gunboat diplomacy Falklands-style was not an option since Britain’s military threat to China is little more than a fly on an elephant’s tail.
During the two year long negotiations Thatcher had to climb down from her high horse more than once. First in September 1982 when she had insisted that the 19th century ‘treaties’ imposed on the Chinese people under duress were valid in international law, for which read ‘imperialism’s law’. So China replied the treaties were ‘ironclad proof of British imperialism’s plunder of Chinese territory’ and subsequently set the tone for the negotiations: Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong was not negotiable and unless agreement about how and when it was to be exercised was reached by September 1984 the People’s Republic would announce its plans for Hong Kong unilaterally. And China stood by this. The Joint Declaration issued by the governments of the PRC and Britain on 26 September states that from 1997 Hong Kong will be directly under the authority of the Central People’s Government of the PRC. No form of British administration after 1997.
However, China’s current economic needs for foreign technical expertise and equipment have forced the PRC government to make concessions to capitalism for 50 years after 1997 in order not to drive away capital investment and technical know-how. Hong Kong is estimated to supply one third of China’s foreign exchange earnings. The weakness of the socialist and anti-imperialist movement in the capitalist heartlands has allowed imperialism to starve China of the means to fully build up its economy. To gain those means the Chinese government has been made to retreat on the economic and social character of Hong Kong’s future. The PRC thus declared its intent ‘to resume the nation’s sovereignty over Hong Kong while maintaining its prosperity and stability’.
With Hong Kong’s reunification with China, the imperialists will lose a key outpost which in the past has been used for military aggression against the people of South East Asia.
Ulla May
LAOS
US imperialism has vowed to turn back the victories of the Indo-Chinese revolutions. Last year an expeditionary force of US Vietnam veterans and mercenaries penetrated deep into Laos, claiming to be in search of US citizens held captive there. On 6 June this year the Thai Army invaded Laos and occupied three Laotian villages, producing a US Army map to justify their actions. The Lao villagers were subjected to heavy shelling, abduction to the Thai border, curfew, rape and the destruction of their homes. Fortifications have been built around the villages turning them into strongholds for sabotage attacks on the revolutionary Laotian people.
To the south the Thai Army has massed ‘itself along the border of Sayaboury Province close to the Laotian-Kampuchean border. This region is riddled with CIA-run bases on Thai territory, used to attack the Kampuchean and Vietnamese peoples. The Lao People’s Democratic Republic has responded to the imperialist provocation and warned that ‘nothing will be able to quench the hatred and the determination of the army and Lao people’ should the Thai invaders not withdraw.
Trevor Rayne
