On Hong Kong, U.S. Blows Hot and Cold

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt once promised Madame Chiang Kai-shek that when the fighting stopped, the United States would favor the return of Hong Kong from Britain to Nationalist China. He later backed down in the face of truculent opposition from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

When U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz was preparing to touch down in Hong Kong for his first trip there in 1983, top aides offered him a few words of advice: Stay out of the simmering dispute between China and Britain over who should control Asia’s most dynamic city.

The American goal is “to avoid giving the impression that the United States is taking sides on the issue of Hong Kong’s future,” then-Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz wrote to his boss in a confidential memo that shows none of the unease over Chinese rule in Hong Kong that can be found in Washington today.

These episodes underscore how the American policy toward Hong Kong has fluctuated over the past century.

The United States has switched from advocating the decolonization of Hong Kong to supporting British rule or Chinese rule to being benignly neutral, all depending on what was happening in Asia and the rest of the world at the time.

Now, as China takes control of Hong Kong, America’s top policymakers and legislators are promising that the United States will watch Hong Kong closely--or even shoulder some of the responsibility that Britain had held for preserving the territory’s freedoms.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote recently that the hand-over marks not only the transfer of Hong Kong to China but also “the hand-over of responsibility for Hong Kong’s fate to the United States. . . . Only the U.S. has the will and the way to stand up for Hong Kong.”

Although he hasn’t voiced as strong a commitment as Helms, President Clinton too has said that the United States will be keeping an eye on what happens in Hong Kong. The United States will “try to continue to insist on and preserve the integrity of the 1984 agreement [setting the terms of Hong Kong’s return],” Clinton said in a June 22 news conference.

Under that 1984 deal, Britain agreed to return the colony to China in exchange for assurances that Beijing would maintain Hong Kong’s capitalist system and allow it a “high degree of autonomy” for 50 years.

*

As one reflection of the American commitment to democracy in Hong Kong, the Clinton administration decided last month that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would not attend swearing-in ceremonies for members of Hong Kong’s Provisional Legislature. These pro-China legislators were selected, with Beijing’s backing, to take the place of the democratically elected legislature that took office in 1995.

This move, however, was somewhat diluted when officials decided that the U.S. consul general would stay to witness the event.

Washington’s worries about the future of Hong Kong stem in large measure from the considerable U.S. economic stake there. The United States exports $14 billion a year in goods to Hong Kong. While estimates vary, experts say that even after the flood of American investment in China over the past decade, U.S. investment in Hong Kong still remains twice as large as in mainland China.

The return of Hong Kong also has military and strategic implications for the United States.

China has gained control of the best port on the Southeast Asian coast. The U.S. Navy has regularly used Hong Kong as a stopover for ships traveling between the United States and the Persian Gulf. The Clinton administration has made arrangements with China to let these Navy port calls continue.

But the underlying reality is that Washington must ask permission from Beijing to do so. If there were some new confrontation with China--as in 1996, when the United States sent two aircraft carriers to the waters off Taiwan amid Chinese live-fire exercises--Beijing could declare Hong Kong off limits to the Navy.

*

Still, some experts say that, from a military standpoint, the importance of Hong Kong is limited. “Hong Kong has never been a factor in the U.S. military calculus,” says Ronald N. Montaperto, a senior fellow at the National Defense University in Washington. “Even if the U.S. military were to be denied access to Hong Kong, the consequences for the U.S. regional position would not be grave.”

Similarly, Montaperto, in a new book called “Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule,” argues that the People’s Liberation Army won’t make much military use of Hong Kong either. That’s because, over past decades, China already has built the facilities elsewhere that it would need in case of a conflict with Vietnam or Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, or in the South China Sea.

U.S. interest in Hong Kong dates to days after the British seized control in the first Opium War, of 1839-1842. American trading firms opened up in the colony. Commodore Matthew Perry anchored in Hong Kong in the winter of 1853 before his expedition to force Japan to open to the world.

The overriding U.S. objective in the territory was to sell products, in Hong Kong and in China itself. “American trade is obtaining a hold on the colony, and with common-sense methods, it will increase from year to year,” Rounsevelle Wildman, the U.S. consul, wrote to Washington in 1898.

Roosevelt’s World War II vision of returning Hong Kong to Nationalist China was part of the broader American effort to induce Britain and France to divest themselves of colonies. But Churchill, saying that “nothing would be taken away from England without a war,” ensured that British troops marched back into Hong Kong at the time of Japan’s defeat in August 1945.

U.S. policy shifted with the beginning of the Cold War and the Communist victory in China’s civil war. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the United States not only supported British rule in Hong Kong but also used the territory as a base for U.S. military and intelligence operations.

But soon after President Richard Nixon’s diplomatic opening to China, the American stance on Hong Kong began to change again, reflecting greater sympathy for Beijing.

“Washington made no protest when China, as one of its first initiatives after admission [to the United Nations in 1971], removed Hong Kong from the U.N. list of colonial territories entitled to self-determination,” Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, a Georgetown University professor, wrote in a history of U.S. policy toward Hong Kong.

*

In the early 1980s, when Britain was negotiating with China over Hong Kong’s future, Washington was preoccupied with other issues. America’s confrontation with the Soviet Union was at its peak, and the United States was eager to preserve close ties with Beijing.

The Ronald Reagan administration had already clashed with China over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and wasn’t eager to get involved in another battle over Hong Kong--seen, ultimately, as Britain’s problem. During this period, the American view was that China’s Communist Party leadership intended to reform and open up not only China’s economy but also its political system.

Looking back now, some in Washington argue that this hands-off policy of the early ‘80s was a mistake. “We will never know how Hong Kong’s current situation might have been different had the U.S. put its leverage--economic and political--behind Britain as it settled Hong Kong’s future,” Helms contended in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

China’s bloody crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 effectively ended America’s policy of benign neglect toward the future of Hong Kong. Increasingly since, members of Congress--and, to a lesser extent, the White House and State Department--have argued that American policy should be aimed at helping to preserve Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy.

In 1992, despite China’s bitter opposition, Congress passed the U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act, a law sponsored by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that supports political freedom in Hong Kong and requires the executive branch to submit regular reports about what is happening there.

The Clinton administration’s policy was made clear in April, when the president met at the White House with Martin Lee, the leader of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, who was the top vote-getter in the 1995 elections for the Hong Kong legislature.