Barrister Martin Lee, who helped draft Hong Kong's Basic Law after Thatcher's talks with Deng Xiaoping in the early eighties, was clearly kept in the dark about all the secret negotiations that Edward Heath had been involved in to set the stage for these talks. See from 1 min 24 secs. "We were completely taken by surprise when Li Hao said that in 1997 Hong Kong will be handed back to China." So the British deliberately chose the most politically naïve people they could find to draft the Basic Law, and they didn't tell them anything about what had really been going on behind the scenes. That may have been their biggest mistake, because the most honest and upstanding people in any society are typicallly the most politically naïve.
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