Percy Cradock

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Percy Cradock : biography

26 October 1923 – 22 January 2010

When John Major succeeded Thatcher as the Prime Minister in 1990, Cradock continued to work in 10 Downing Street, but his relationship with Major was not as good as with Thatcher. On 7 February 1991, when Major was holding a cabinet meeting at Number 10, the Provisional IRA launched a mortar bomb at the building, smashing all the windows of the conference room. Fortunately, no one in the cabinet meeting, including Cradock, was injured by the terrorist attack.

Since the Joint Declaration was signed in 1984, Hong Kong had entered its last thirteen years of British colonial rule, which was also known as the "transitional period". During the period, China and Britain continued to discuss the details of the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong scheduled for 1997. Nevertheless, when the Tiananmen Square crackdown occurred on 4 June 1989, Hong Kong fell into a new series of confidence crisis. An unprecedented one million people assembled in downtown Central, expressing their anger towards the Communist regime’s military suppression of the peaceful student rally in Peking which was in support of freedom and democracy in China. After the crackdown, the talks between Britain and China came to a halt, with an international boycott of China. In Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, public opinion called for the British government to denounce and abandon the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and many felt worried about transferring Hong Kong from Britain to the Communist regime. Among them, the Senior Unofficial Member of the Executive Council of Hong Kong, Dame Lydia Dunn, even publicly urged Britain not to hand over British subjects in Hong Kong to a regime that "did not hesitate to use its tanks and forces on its own people".Russell Spurr, Excellency: The Governors of Hong Kong, Hong Kong: FormAsia, 1995.

Cradock was instructed to visit Peking secretly in the end of 1989, trying to maintain the Joint Declaration and to cool down the Communist antipathy in Hong Kong. In Peking, he tirelessly lobbied China to guarantee a greater degree of freedom and democracy in post-1997 Hong Kong. It was by his efforts that China agreed to gradually promote democratization in the future Hong Kong Special Administrative Region by allowing half of the sixty seats of the Legislative Council to be directly elected by 2007, and that was achieved in 2004. The promise guaranteed by China was subsequently reassured in the Annex II of the Basic Law of Hong Kong promulgated in 1990. With the consent of Britain, any reform of the colonial Legislative Council before 1997 would have to be endorsed by China, so as to allow the colonial legislature a ticket for the so-called "through-train", enabling it to be smoothly transferred to the post-1997 Hong Kong. Besides, Cradock suggested that the post of "Deputy Governor" could be created for the future Chief Executive-elect in order to let the future leader of Hong Kong get ready for the job before 1997. Cradock believed that these measures would be effective in maintaining the prosperity of Hong Kong, and in the long run, he believed all the seats of the Legislative Council would be directly elected.

Apart from the above measures, to rebuild confidence of the people of Hong Kong towards their future, Governor Sir David Wilson introduced the Airport Core Programme, which was also known as the "Rose Garden Project", in his annual Policy Address to the Legislative Council in October 1989. However, as the projected cost was very expensive and the programme would endure across 1997, the Chinese government soon critically accused that the "Rose Garden Project" was in fact a plot of Britain to squander Hong Kong’s abundant foreign exchange reserves, and a tactic to secretly withdraw the capitals back to the United Kingdom. They even threatened that they would not "bless" the project.〈港國際機場洗雪啟用初期大混亂的恥辱〉,《高行網》,2000年8月14日。 The British government was anxious to gain the support of China. They secretly sent Cradock to China for several occasions in 1990 and 1991, "explaining" the details of the new airport project to the Chinese leaderships and reassuring to Chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party Jiang Zemin that the new airport would not bring any harm to China. Despite his reassurance, Jiang insisted that the dispute could not be solved unless Prime Minister John Major visited China and to sign a memorandum.