AS MEMBERS OF HONG KONG'S LEGISlative Council sat in silence, Governor Christopher Patten unleashed a sharp-tongued salvo against Beijing last week -- a measure of his frustration with the intransigent mainland government. Declaring that Britain and China had only "weeks rather than months" to map out something resembling a democratic future for the colony, Patten threatened to push ahead unilaterally with political reform, specifically his effort to broaden, however modestly, Hong Kong's electoral base, a program that has drawn Beijing's unrelenting ire. In urging the legislators to fight for reform, Patten asked, "If we are not prepared to stand up for Hong Kong's way of life today, what chance of doing so tomorrow?"
While Patten's speech contained considerable bluff, it also reflected growing irritation in London and Washington with Beijing's toughened posture on a variety of issues ranging from Hong Kong's future to human rights to nuclear proliferation. U.S. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake recently described China as a "backlash," or antidemocratic, state like Iran, Iraq or Chile under General Augusto Pinochet. So concerned is the Clinton Administration with the deteriorating relationship that Secretary of State Warren Christopher has launched a high-level effort to turn things around, beginning with the dispatch to Beijing this week of John Shattuck, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. The Christopher initiative promptly ran into an announcement by China that, despite public entreaties from 20 nations including the U.S., it had carried out its 38th atomic-weapons test -- in defiance of an informal test-ban moratorium that Washington has supported.
The test, at Lop Nur in the northwestern Gobi Desert region of China, was a sign that Beijing too is irritated, specifically with what hard-liners in the regime consider blackmail, interference and pressure from the West. Amid intensified maneuvering to succeed ailing senior leader Deng Xiaoping, the conservatives have gained influence in the top echelons of government. Last May, President Jiang Zemin told the Politburo, in reference to U.S. human- rights pressures, that "we will not yield to hegemonism and power politics. For the motherland's sovereignty, independence and dignity, we are ready to pay a price." At the same time, uncertainty about the succession has begun to paralyze the Chinese bureaucracy vis-a-vis such sensitive issues as the negotiations on political organization in Hong Kong after the Chinese takeover in 1997. Says a China watcher in Hong Kong: "No one wants to make a decision now. That would bind them, and no one knows what is going to happen when Deng dies."