CONSERVATIVE PRIME MINISTERS and presidents do seem to be most welcome in the Chinese People’s Republic: Heath, Nixon, Thatcher. No Soviet Communist, even if allowed into the Forbidden City in the first place, would command half such cordiality as Britain’s Prime Minister encountered on her first visit to the giant of the Far East last month.
To be sure, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher needed as much cordiality as she could get, since the future of Hong Kong was top on the agenda. To say that the Chinese are an extraordinary people is to stress the obvious, but despite the occasional anti-British riot, the Communist regime in Peking does seem over the years to have contemplated the spectacle of capitalist opulence in the New Territories and on the island of Victoria (Hong Kong proper) with considerably greater equanimity than the East Germans and their Soviet masters looked upon West Berlin before the Wall was built. Not only does no comparable device bring death to citizens of the People’s Republic seeking the freedom of Hong Kong (though strong swimmers have been known to have been fired upon), but Hong Kong denizens would die of thirst without Mainland water.
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