Doug Bereuter: “last March, Speaker Gingrich visited Asia. In the course of his visit to Hong Kong, he determined it would be…”

“last March, Speaker Gingrich visited Asia. In the course of his visit to Hong Kong, he determined it would be appropriate to create a House task force to observe and report on the Hong Kong transition as it moved from colonial rule of the United Kingdom to become a separate but integral part of the People's Republic of China. He mandated that I chair that task force. We created a bipartisan task force of equal numbers from the membership of the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific of the House Committee on International Relations, eight members total. The Speaker mandated that we visit Hong Kong and Beijing a minimum of every 6 months and provide a quarterly report to the Congress on the transition, to let the People's Republic of China know that we are watching that transition and to thereby try to protect the freedoms that existed in Hong Kong before the transition. Interestingly, the Australian Parliament has a similar effort underway. In the first report of the Speaker's Task Force on the Hong Kong Transition, dated October 1, 1997, we reported that Hong Kong's reversion to China was characterized as 'so far, so good.' Six months after the official reversion, that characterization still applies.”