Thank you. You raise a lot of tricky questions.

Let me just add a few words about the previous question. A book entitled Experiences of China by Percy Cradock explains a great deal about that. Percy Cradock was one of the British advisors in 1984. In his book, he explains that the British agreed that they would not implement a democratic process before 1997. There was an entire secret agreement behind it that was made public when Chris Patten became governor because he broke the promises revealed in Percy Cradock’s book.

In terms of these difficult issues, it is true that it is a dance of a kind. A democratic country like Canada, which sees a lot of issues and human relations at stake, must be able to reaffirm all its values, principles and so on.

For instance, on September 28 of last year, we saw that the police response was not appropriate. That was definitely a baptism of fire for them. The police officers were not properly trained for a situation like that and they made mistakes. In such cases, it is true that a country like Canada can still take a strong stand and reaffirm its values, which still has an impact. It is not a direct intervention, since no one is dictating any course of action, but it does make a difference.

I think that one of Canada’s great qualities is its ability to have a multicultural dialogue and debate. These are very strong qualities, multicultural mediation skills and so on. Canada needs to try to bring those forward. For the impact to be more far-reaching, perhaps we need to promote the win-win aspects all the time. We are aware of the challenges facing Chinese leaders but we are not trying to intervene. On the one hand, we want the reforms, but on the other hand, we want our values. So we continue to believe that it is possible to achieve both by encouraging dialogue.

Furthermore, we need to decide the issue of finding competent, legitimate people supported by the public and also trusted by Beijing. Beijing is not able to square the circle. One of the problems is that Beijing does not have good relations with all the democratic leaders and the new young ones. This is true not only for the more reactionary members, but also for the reformers.

How can these ties be encouraged? Significantly more dialogue is needed, from both sides. As a professor, I see that fewer young people from Hong Kong are now graduating with two degrees, one from China and one from Hong Kong, or trying to be trained in China while still being in Hong Kong. It is important to attempt to build those human relations because, today, the issue is one of trust. Competent people from Hong Kong are not able to reassure Beijing that, despite that competence, they have no desire to be the cause of secession or security problems. At the same time, Beijing cannot bring itself to trust them although the gap is actually very small.

As Simon and Alan said, it is very unlikely that a lawyer or a professional from Hong Kong who is close to the Democratic Party will be a secessionist or will want to threaten the integrity of China. However, he is not able to demonstrate that to China. So China is shutting out people who are not actually a real threat. That is the tragedy of mistrust.

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