How One Newspaper Called the Hong Kong Story Right From the Start

Wall Street Journal Figured It Out a Generation in Advance 

By IRA STOLL, Special to the Sun | July 5, 2021

Journalists celebrate themselves annually with Pulitzer Prizes for the best work published in the previous year. Often, though, a single year is too short a time span in which to judge journalism. A different and more distinguished prize might eventually be established and awarded for journalism published a decade, or perhaps even a quarter-century earlier. It can sometimes take that long to judge whether the reporters and editors got a story right.

In that spirit, I’ve lately been looking back at the American press coverage from 1984. That was the year that China and Great Britain issued their “Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong.”..............The course of events in Hong Kong was not just entirely predictable; it was predicted, entirely, in advance, by the Journal editors with remarkable clarity: “It is in the nature of totalitarian regimes to control.”.........

The Journal, of course, proved to be right. The Joint Declaration of 1984 proved to be a stain on the legacies of both Thatcher and Reagan, about whom there is otherwise so much to admire. Let it be a reminder to President Biden, as he weighs future negotiations with Communist China, Iran, the Taliban, or even Syria or the Hamas leadership in Gaza, that any deal with such a regime is only as good as a free country’s determination and ability to enforce its terms.............To Read More.....

My Take - The Wall Street Journal may have been the only newspaper to have read the tea leaves correctly, but there were a great many who weren't in the information delivery business who did also.  I was one of them, this really was totally predictable.  As for writer's comment about Thatcher and Reagan; the question was then and still is this:  What exactly were they supposed to do?  The 100 year agreement was running out, and there was no way they could impose an independent Hong Kong on China, so what were their alternatives?   

There are times when leaders aren't left deciding between right and wrong.  They're left with deciding which wrong is the most right. While it's true that decision will eventually that comes back to haunt them, but that's the world as I see it, and a world that has to be dealt with.