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Chris Yeung

Less than 48 hours before her death, solicitor Dorothy Liu Yiu-chu asked her driver to take her private nurse to her Deep Water Bay flat to fetch her a scarf.She styled her hair, put on an outfit and waited patiently for us at her hospital bed at Queen Mary.

  She talked of the significance of the rule of law and her dismay over the provisional legislature plan. She said she was happy to have her photo taken so that her friends would know she was fine.

  We knew she was not. It was Friday afternoon. Liu remained cheerful and optimistic, telling us she ate well, slept well and was being kept informed of the current issues. She said she was not suffering from an incurable illness, but had apparently been ill since October.

  She died early Sunday morning from a blocked pancreas. She was 63.

  One of the first batch of local Chinese chosen by Beijing to prepare for the handover, Liu's political career had been seen as over for some time.

  That Tung Chee-hwa, Chris Patten, the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office and Xinhua all had words of condolence and praise for her contribution is part of the irony of her legendary role in Hong Kong's transition.

  Liu's links with China dated back to her childhood. Her late father, Liu Yan-tak was a personal friend of the late Liu Chengzhi, the first director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office.

  She studied English at the University of Hong Kong and Oxford before shifting to law. She began practising law in the 1960s. It was in 1979 when China began its open door and reform policy that Liu grouped together some local professionals to set up an association for the advancement of China's modernisation drive, an achievement she felt proud of.

  She was appointed as one of the 20-odd local elites to take part in the drafting of the Basic Law in 1985. A Western-trained lawyer who never concealed her resistance to communism, she faced contradictions and challenges to her love-hate relationship with the ruling communist regime.

  As one of the handful of lawyers in the drafting body, Liu played an important role in translating the ideal of 'one country, two systems' and the concept of a high degree of autonomy into a set of constitutional parameters governing the Central Government and the Special Administrative Region (SAR).

  This found her at times in the middle of irreconcilable conundrums between, on one hand, mainland officials who were obsessed with the principle of 'one country' and unfamiliar with the common law system, and on the other, those including liberal-minded barrister Martin Lee Chu-ming who wanted minimal central control.

  Liu was instrumental in the drafting of a number of crucial provisions in the Basic Law that defined issues such as jurisdictions of local courts and delineation of powers between the Central Government and the SAR. Her love-hate complex towards the communist regime put her in an unenviable position after the June 4 crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

  She tried to make a distinction between what the Beijing leaders could do under the law and should do under the political situation at that time. Liu argued it was within the law for the Central Government to impose martial law and maintain law and order, but that using excessive force was a different matter.

  It was yet another irreconcilable contradiction between the people and the regime, and one which would be hard to resolve despite her well-intentioned move to propose a minute's silence during a group discussion at the National People's Congress (NPC) plenum in 1991 for the 'soldiers, the students, the innocent civilians and passers-by who were on the streets, who died or who were hurt'.

If Liu was frustrated that the community did not understand and appreciate her move, it was because they found the use of military force to suppress the student-led protests could never be justified. All moves to diffuse the tension and rebuild trust and harmony were futile.

  Her bold move took its toll on her relationship between the mainland officials handling Hong Kong affairs, particularly Xinhua, as well as hardliners in the local pro-China camp. Coupled with the communist regime's move to broaden the net of a united front in the new phase of transition after the June 4 killings, Liu found herself increasingly isolated from the mainstream pro-China camp.

  For a nationalist who looked forward to the end of colonial rule, she would not accept any early exit from the political scene before July 1. She agreed to serve another five-year term in the NPC in 1992. And when Governor Chris Patten arrived later that year, with a political bombshell, she knew where she stood.

  'When it's a question of conflict between Britain and China, I have made it clear I will, without reservation, always be on China's side,' said the maverick lawyer. She said she must be '100 per cent on the Chinese side in order to work for the end of colonial rule'.

  Lofty and pure as she thought nationalism and patriotism were, the real world was full of compromise and unprincipled trading of interests. Having long ridiculed any favours from the colonial government as an 'insult', Liu was scornful towards what she once described as 'old batteries', the political elites groomed by the colonial rulers.

  So much so that she wept at a meeting of the now-defunct Preliminary Working Committee (PWC) when she sat next to Sir Sze-yuen Chung, a former senior Executive Councillor.

  Asked Sir Sze-yuen: 'Did you get a cold?' Liu said: 'No. I just feel sorrow.' She later said she felt sad sitting next to those who had been loyal to the colonial government.

  The NPC deputy was unable to accept the reality that, for various reasons, China had decided to draw some of the leading former political figures under British rule into their own camp to help fight in the bitter row over Mr Patten's political reform.

  She quit the PWC in March 1994 and, to nobody's surprise, was not included in the 150-member Preparatory Committee last year. Long stigmatised as 'pro-China', Liu, ironically, was seen more as a communist-basher. She was critical of some of the decisions of the Preparatory Committee including its most controversial: to set up the the provisional legislature.

  She decided not to attend a selection committee meeting to select the provisional legislature in December. Citing health reasons, she said: 'From the perspective of the selection committee and the provisional legislature, this [health] is not the official reason. I'm now ill. That's the official reason for them. But I know deep in my heart and I won't mind everyone in the world knowing, the one real reason is that I do not agree with the provisional legislature.'   Some may say she deceived herself. But Liu did say and do what she believed and she remained true to herself, a quality that has become increasingly rare when bending with the wind is the way to survive.



Staying true to the end