What Qian Qichen and Deng Xiaoping could teach today’s Chinese leaders

Alice Wu says Zhang Dejiang’s veiled scolding of Hong Kong while in Macau was unseemly. In a week that also saw the death of China’s diplomat par excellence, Qian Qichen, the contrast could not be more stark

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Then Chinese vice-premier Qian Qichen speaks during a conference on China-US relations in 2003 at the Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Qian died on May 9 aged 89. Photo: AP

Published: 9:00am, 14 May 2017Updated: 8:02pm, 14 May 2017

Former Chinese vice-premier and foreign minister, the late Qian Qichen (錢其琛), will be remembered for accomplishing the toughest of tasks – he had to handle normalising Beijing’s relations with the West after 1989, as well as Hong Kong and Macau’s return to China. Qian was respected at home and abroad, and will be remembered for his intelligence, charm and having the “right touch”, an intuitive skill that’s increasingly rare nowadays.

Handling the Hong Kong and Macau handovers could not have been a walk in the park. Unfortunately, looking at the state of “one country, two systems” now, I can’t say that all that hard work had been worthwhile.

Just two weeks ago, the legal chief of the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong, Wang Zhenmin (王振民), threatened to scrap it. The “great experiment”, as Wang called it, has been running for barely 20 years. We’re not even halfway to Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) promised “50 years”.

In any case, tantrums don’t command respect, and Wang’s, “If the model fails, the country will only lose face, but Hong Kong will lose everything” sounds like a tantrum to me. It was petty.

National People’s Congress Standing Committee chairman Zhang Dejiang speaks to the press shortly after his arrival at the international airport in Macau last Monday. Photo: AFP

A lecture from Beijing that Hong Kong should not ignore

That kind of pettiness was on display in Macau last week. Zhang Dejiang’s (張德江) visit to Macau did not quite live up to the hype. It’s hard not to feel insulted for our “brother” Macau. Officials rolled out the red carpet just so their city could be relegated to being a launchpad of veiled attacks on Hong Kong’s “independence” movement.