Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I am so glad I did not come with a prepared speech because I would then have to busily rewrite it. Curtis, in his introduction, almost said it all for me.

Let me tell you my way of solving a practical problem which is looming about and I'm sure it is taking the Chinese and British teams a lot of time to resolve. That is, we have two legislatures already in Hong Kong. This is not a bicameral system, otherwise that would be easy. We have a Hong Kong legislature democratically elected by the people of Hong Kong in September 1995. (At least, some of us were democratically elected.) But everybody was elected in one way or another. Now, on the other hand, we have a China-appointed legislature which was constituted very recently, 21 December 1996. Each body has 60 members. How do you deal with them at midnight on the 30th of June? Now, because we were elected under British rule, I am certain the British government would have to invite us to be present at this all-important occasion; but what about those who are going to replace us, the other 26 ladies and gentlemen who will replace us? Because they have been appointed by China, Britain, of course, would not like for them to be on the podium before midnight 30 June 1997; whereas, China would not like us to be there after the strike of midnight. So how do you resolve this?

Now I want to prove to you how wrong it is when people say that Martin Lee is only destructive and not constructive: I will give them three options to choose from. Option number one is the cheapest: at the stroke of midnight, the 26 of us will just take our shoes and run away like Cinderella, and then the other 26 will come and take the stage. That is the easy way. The more elaborate way would be for us, the 26, to sit on a special platform on the stage and at the strike of midnight the platform drops into the sea; and then, from heaven above, another platform comes down with the 26 China-appointed members. How's that for Hollywood? A third option would involve a rotating platform: the 26 of us would sit at the front of the stage during the British part of the ceremony, and the other 26 would sit at the back of the stage. At the strike of midnight, it will rotate. As the people come out, they will applaud, of course. As we get to the back stage, the police will be waiting for us, with handcuffs. Who says that Martin Lee is not constructive?

Now, let me go back to 26 September 1984, when I was reading the Joint Declaration for the first time. A television crew wanted to interview me on the Joint Declaration immediately after it was announced to the Legislative Council. At that time, I was not on the Legislative Council because at that time the Legislative Council was appointed by the Governor. And no governor, in his wisdom, ever thought to appoint me. So I said I wanted to read it beforehand on an embargoed basis. They agreed: they would give me a room but I must not have any contact with the outside world because the whole thing was embargoed. Fair enough, I thought.

So there I was, in a windowless room with air-conditioning, one desk, one chair, one pencil, a writing pad, and a copy of the Joint Declaration. And I read it, and I was happy. Because therewere a number of sentences which I remember very well. The first important sentence says that our Chief Executive in the future would be either selected according to the result of consultation or election held locally. Now I could see that the British and Chinese could not agree, butbecause both options were there, I thought to myself that there was hope that our Chief Executive would be elected. Further down, there is another sentence which says the legislature of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be constituted by elections. At that time, as I have said, every legislator was appointed by the Governor. But in 13 ½ years time, come 1 July 1997, the entire legislature would be constituted by elections. The next sentence says the executive authorities shall abide by the law and be accountable to the legislature. I first thought, well, why did they have to say the executive authorities should abide by the law, until I realized that in China, they do not. The next one, "shall be accountable to the Legislature," means that the people of Hong Kong would be able to elect their first Chief Executive and also every member of the legislature, and through that elected legislature the people of Hong Kong would be able to hold the government accountable to them. The word democracy was not there, but I thought it was really there. I thought it could work because ?one country-two systems' is never an easy formula to work, although your government was the first to applaud as soon as the agreement was announced. And Deng Xiaoping was very happy at the time because the whole world applauded and he said, "What a beautiful idea of mine this was. And I command the world to resolve your problems according to my method: one country-two systems." The whole world applauded, and I said, it is possible to work. Not easy, this ?one country-two systems.' We have a small system of six million people at a time and the Chinese mainland has 1.2 billion.

How do you find balance? We all played the see-saw game when we were young. So how does an adult play that game with a small kid, because the adult is much heavier and it would [tilt]? The only way to play is for the adult to walk to one side and tell Little Tommy to stay there while he, the adult, [goes] to the other side and go forward until equilibrium is struck. Then we have a game. Of course, Little Tommy is Hong Kong and the grown-up is China. So it calls for the greatest cooperation on the part of China and it calls for the greatest restraint so that China should help Hong Kong maintain the best position to make it work. China must help us all the way. We were promised ?one country-two systems,' Hong Kong ruling Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy. How high is high? To most of you here I am not that tall, but to Deng Xiaoping, I am very tall. So how high is high?

It was defined to me that, apart from defense and foreign affairs, we the people of Hong Kong would be masters of our own house. In short, China agreed to adopt a hands-off policy on Hong Kong to make it work.

But what do we see now in Hong Kong, 98 days away from the handover ceremony? China has changed that policy into a policy of hands-on. China has already carefully selected our first Chief Executive, a shipping magnate called Tung Chee-hwa. But I knew that it would be him as far back as January 1996. How did I know? Like so many of you, I watched the television news: there was a scene when Mr. Jiang Zemin, the President, was attending an important meeting of the Preparatory Committee in Beijing. All the tycoons were there, and there was Jiang Zemin coming into the picture, as it were, and he was looking for somebody. He saw this man with a crewcut, walked over to him and shook him warmly by the hand, thereby anointing the first Chief Executive. Ever since then, I have been referring to a so-called Selection Committee, which is supposed to select the Chief Executive, as the Tung Chee-hwa Selection Committee. I started this back in February 1996, and there was no surprise for me when indeed they happened to have elected Mr. Tung Chee-hwa on 11 December 1996. So Beijing already has the Chief Executive appointed by Beijing; therefore, he will run Hong Kong together with the civil servants. Beijing controls the Executive.

As for the Legislature, [China has] already appointed another legislature which will no doubt pass any law that Beijing wants it to pass. What about the courts? In the Joint Declaration, we were promised that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will have the final right of adjudication and that the Final Court of Appeal will be established in Hong Kong. That court may, if necessary, invite judges from other overseas common law jurisdictions to sit on it. Those were the promises. Yet when the Basic Law, which is going to be our future constitution, was drawn up there is this sentence (Article 166) which took away from the Court of Final Appeal (the highest court in the land) the power to interpret all the key articles of the Basic Law - our constitution. Can you imagine the Supreme Court of [the United States] not being allowed to interpret any key provision of your constitution? With one hand they give us the final right of adjudication, with the other hand they took it back. They control the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary.

It does not stop there, as they will soon be controlling the press. Under Article 23 of the Basic Law, the legislature -- their appointed legislature -- will soon be passing a law against subversion. What is subversion? I shall give you an illustration: a few months ago, a famous Chinese dissident -- Wang Den -- was sentenced to eleven years of imprisonment. What did he do? The whole indictment was published in Hong Kong and I read through the whole document and I could not find any defense being disclosed. Example: he was supposed to have registered himself as an external history student with a university in California. That was subversion. He wrote an article published in Hong Kong's newspaper, which was not even circulated in China, in which he said that in China there is no press freedom. The Chinese court agreed, and therefore gave him eleven years. Just imagine the impact of that on the Hong Kong press after 1 July 1997. The Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr. Qian Qichen, said recently that, after 1 July 1997, reporters may not make personal attacks on Chinese leaders. Our reporters are not terrible people. They do not go up to the Chinese leaders and sock them on the nose. What he meant, of course, was our reporters may not criticize the Chinese leaders by name. Can you imagine what your reporters would do if they cannot report or criticize President Clinton by name? How would they call him? I leave it to your imagination. The same Chinese Foreign Minster also said that, as of 1 July 1997, the reporters would enjoy press freedom but they may not report rumors or lies. How many of your newspapers would go out of business if they cannot report rumors or lies? I'm sure President Clinton would love it; they are all rumors, he says. But what is a lie when the truth is carefully suppressed?

That is not all: they are going to control education. You can expect that of the Communists because they always control the courts, the law-making body, the government, the schools, the television, and the press. We have eight universities in Hong Kong and the heads of seven of them are already appointed to sit on this Preparatory Committee which is a very important body chaired by the Chinese Minister Qian Qichen, and which is going to make decisions on Hong Kong. They all supported a number of very bad decisions like rolling back our human rights protection laws, and emasculating the Bill of Rights ordinance by repealing the most important provision which protects all human rights. That provision gives power to all our courts to strike down any law which, in the view of the court, is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights. This means that, if the legislature were to pass a repressive law, the courts would not enforce it; rather, they would declare it null and void, thereby protecting individuals liberties. That section has been declared null and void by China. After 1 July 1997, our courts would have to enforce every law as they find it.

In Weimar Germany, before Hitler, the German judges did good justice to the German people. Once Hitler took over, he had the laws changed, and overnight the judges found that they had become instruments of injustice. Some still tried to help the people and they were executed. When a law-making body is in the control of China on Day One, China will control the Hong Kong legislature forever. This legislature will make new electoral laws to make quite sure that my party, which is the most popular party and which won 65 percent of the popular vote in September 1995, will end up having no more than one-quarter of the seats. That's what they would do. And one more thing on education: the same Foreign Minister from China, Mr. Qian Qichen, said recently that our history books would have to be rewritten in some aspects. Why was it up to such a senior Chinese official to concern himself about our history books? History books are revised from year to year, but that is the job of a rather lowly civil servant in the education department. Of course, by saying these things, he wanted to make sure that China would be able to brainwash our young students by, for example, saying that on 4 June 1989 nobody was killed in Tiananmen Square; alternatively, 23 were killed. That is the sort of history that will be rewritten. China will be controlling the Executive, the Legislature, the Judiciary, the press and education. China already has all of these institutions in place. All the buttons are already installed in Beijing so that if China were to press one button, something gets done for them in Hong Kong, and if they were to press another button, another thing gets done for them in Hong Kong. We can only hope and pray that China will not press any of its buttons.

What has the world been doing? As I said, when the Joint Declaration was first announced the whole world applauded. The Joint Declaration has been broken many times over. The most blatant breach was to give us an appointed legislature instead of the appointed one, as promised. Every government in the world supported the Joint Declaration in 1984, and still supports it. That is fine, but do you support implementation of an international agreement or do you support the violation of it? And by supporting that Joint Declaration, that means supporting the return of Hong Kong's people to China. Does your government not owe the Hong Kong people at least a moral obligation to make sure that all the promises made in 1984 are kept? You see, we are not asking for independence; that is contrary to the Joint Declaration. We have always supported the return of Hong Kong to China, and we still do; but we insist that all of these promises made to us in 1984 be carried out to the full.

Why isn't any government interested? Because each is looking at China starry-eyed, as the great China-trade pie, and every government wants to have a larger slice of it. Isn't it sad, when the whole world is marching toward democracy and human rights and the rule of law, while we in Hong Kong are going in exactly the opposite direction? Let me raise this question with you: how can the US government, or indeed any democratic government in this world, encourage the third world countries to aspire to have democracy and human rights when we in Hong Kong, who have them, are allowed to lose them? Then there are people who say China is progressing economically. It is so, but why is it relevant to Hong Kong, which is about to lose its freedoms? What is the logical connection between the two? And if Hong Kong can retain its freedoms and the rule of law, surely Hong Kong will continue to provide a good example to China as to what it could mean, particularly when nobody in Hong Kong is asking for independence and the Chinese government knows that. But if you allow Hong Kong to lose its freedoms and the rule of law and its modest degree of democracy, how do you expect China to make progress in that direction?

People say that I am fighting a lost cause. They are wrong. I never believe in lost causes. I am sure I am on a winner. How can I lose when I am fighting for democracy and human rights and the rule of law at the end of this century? I am confident that Hong Kong will have democracy and human rights and the rule of law. I may not see that in my lifetime, but how can I lose so long as I do not give up? I only lose when I give up. But members of my party are going to stay in Hong Kong and continue with this fight, and with the help of our friends all over the world, we will be there. My vision is that one day my country, which is a big country, will become a really great nation -- where the human rights of every citizen of China will be respected and protected by the rule of law. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.