U.S. Focuses on Hong Kong’s Future : Diplomacy: Washington is asserting its interest in the British colony’s 1997 return to Chinese control. The issue could complicate Sino-American relations.

Over the past decade, the United States has avoided becoming entangled in disputes over the future of Hong Kong, even though tens of thousands of Americans work there and more than $7 billion in American money is invested there.

Whenever questions arose about one of Southeast Asia’s most dynamic cities, Washington offered the same official answer: Hong Kong’s future should be left in the hands of Britain, the current ruler of the crown colony, and of China, which will regain sovereignty over Hong Kong in mid-1997.

Now that is changing. Increasingly, the U.S. government is asserting its interest in the future of Hong Kong and involving itself in some of the vexing problems raised by its coming transfer from British to Chinese control.

In the process, Hong Kong is moving toward center stage as one of the most significant issues between the United States and China. And chances are that over the next four years, the new Clinton Administration will find itself ever-more preoccupied with the effects--economic, diplomatic and military--of China’s 1997 takeover.

The latest sign of the changing American role came this week, when senior Bush Administration officials here privately informed a top Chinese official that the United States supports British-sponsored measures aimed at bringing greater democracy to Hong Kong. Among them are plans to allow direct elections for Hong Kong’s municipal councils; expand the seats on the Legislative Council, which are now chosen according to one’s profession or employment, and lower Hong Kong’s voting age from 21 to 18.

China has furiously denounced the new proposals, initiated by the new British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. But when Lu Ping, the Chinese official who heads China’s office for Hong Kong affairs, visited Washington this week, senior Administration officials told him they generally back Patten’s measures, U.S. officials and diplomatic sources said.

“I wouldn’t call it the most productive visit I’ve had,” said one U.S. official who met with Lu. He said he told Lu that “the ugly language being used” by China about the British proposals “would not play well in a congressional debate” about renewing China’s trade benefits in this country.

Lu’s visit here, the first by a Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong, came only a few weeks after Congress passed and President Bush signed little-noticed legislation, the U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act, which provides a new legal basis for future American involvement in Hong Kong’s affairs.

The new law requires the secretary of state to report regularly to Congress on conditions in Hong Kong, including “the development of democratic institutions” there. It gives the President the power to determine whether Hong Kong is “sufficiently autonomous” after Britain hands over sovereignty to China on July 1, 1997. China had tried to scuttle the legislation, accusing the United States of “interfering in the internal affairs of China.” But the Bush Administration, which has opposed several other congressional initiatives concerning China, endorsed the Hong Kong measure.

In 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang signed an agreement under which Britain agreed to transfer sovereignty over Hong Kong to China in 1997. In exchange, China promised that Hong Kong will be allowed to keep its capitalist system and “a high degree of autonomy” for 50 years after the changeover.

But the agreement left unclear exactly what sort of government Hong Kong would have and how independent it would be from the Chinese regime in Beijing after 1997.

For more than a century, the British governor possessed, at least in theory, virtually absolute powers over Hong Kong’s population of nearly 6 million people, although Britain had opened the way for some very modest and limited efforts toward democracy.

Since 1984, Hong Kong activists, including many lawyers and other professionals, have pressed Britain to open the way for democracy, so that the colony will have an elected government by the time of China’s takeover.

China has strongly opposed democratization, and Britain generally yielded to China’s wishes until earlier this year, when Prime Minister John Major sent in Patten, a close political ally, as the new governor with an apparent mandate to take a tougher line with Beijing.

Lu came to the United States on a trip organized months ago by the National Committee for U.S.-China Relations, a group responsible for arranging exchanges and delegations between the two countries. In Washington, he met with William Clark Jr., assistant secretary of state for Asia, and with officials at the National Security Council, the Commerce Department and the office of U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills.

Several sources said the trip seemed to be part of an effort by the Chinese government to reassure American businesses of Hong Kong’s stability. It also may have been designed to test what future U.S. policies and intentions will be concerning Hong Kong.

When he met with scholars and officials at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, Lu took “a pretty hard line. His bottom line is, the less political change (in Hong Kong), the better,” one participant said. When a questioner reminded the Chinese official that polls show the overwhelming majority of Hong Kong residents support the British moves toward democracy, Lu responded that “this will change over the long run.”

Lu went to unusual lengths to stay out of the public eye. He refused to speak even briefly to Hong Kong journalists covering his trip.