Beijing won't yield to Occupy Central, says ex-Thatcher aide Charles Powell
A former aide to late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher says it is naive to expect Beijing to yield to Occupy Central's demands.
A former aide to late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher says it is naive to expect Beijing to yield to Occupy Central's demands.
His comments came as a US government group backed the protesters' goals.
Charles Powell, who served as private secretary to Thatcher when Britain negotiated Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty, said he did not believe the protests that have paralysed parts of the city would force change.
"The position about elections has been clear since [the Basic Law] was published in 1991 and I don't believe for one moment that Chinese are going to change that basic position," he said.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Powell said Hong Kong had always been part of China. "We rented for a while and we didn't introduce democracy. One reason we didn't is because we knew it was eventually going back to China and it would have been far worse to introduce full democracy and then taken it away from them."
The British peer is now a director of property developer Hongkong Land and chairman of the Asia Task Force, a UK government advisory group on trade and investment.
Also during the weekend, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a US government body that advises Congress on relations with China, said it supported an open and democratic system in Hong Kong based on universal suffrage and freedom of expression.
"We urge Hong Kong's leadership to adopt an election process based on universal suffrage which provides a genuine choice of candidates," it said. "We urge Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to exercise restraint and respect protesters' right to express their views."
Jeff Bader, a former Asia adviser to US President Barack Obama, told on Thursday that the protests would not last long and that Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying might have been playing the situation well.
"It's unrealistic to think that millions of Hongkongers are going to remain supportive or even tolerant over weeks as the city grinds to a halt. The sympathies are going to shift if this continues," he said. "People may be sympathetic, but reality and the needs of daily life intrude. So [Leung's] strategy so far of watching and waiting is not stupid."
On Saturday, Singapore Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam was quoted in Singapore media as saying: "China will be firm. It is not going to institute any major political change to copy the Western models in the short term.
"The leadership believes that any such move will be disastrous for China and will hurt the people of China."
