No more kowtows.

Hong Kong--Not since Lord Macartney refused to get down on all fours and perform the ritual "Three Kneelings and Nine Prostrations" two hundred years ago this spring has one of Her Majesty's representatives so rattled Peking. The offending party is Hong Kong's new governor, Chris Patten, whose crime has been to deny China a veto over his proposals for political reform in the remaining four years of British rule. Although Chinese leaders traditionally prefer to make their feelings known in enigmatic riddles, in Patten's case they have mad an exception. He has been called "a prostitute," "a thief," a relic of "stinking colonialism," and "the greatest criminal in Hong Kong history."

Nor were these off-the-cuff remarks by lower-ranking or unnamed officials. To the contrary, these characterizations have been published in the highest Party organs, and Premier Li Peng himself employed a few of them in a television address to the National People's Congress. In popular lore it has all been depicted as a clash over democracy, and most of the press has bought this line. This is most unfortunate, because it clouds the more fundamental reasons behind the clash.

Pattern acknowledges as much himself. "I freely confess that my proposals are not a great step forward toward democracy," he recently told the Far Eastern Economic Review. "They aren't even a small step.... What they are is an attempt to secure a legislative council which is broadly based, which is credible, which isn't simply a rubber stamp."

Without this latter, any hopes for Hong Kong's enjoying the "high degree of autonomy" promised it in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration is impossible. The reasons lie in the peculiar colonial framework that now exists, in which virtually all real power is held by the executive. It is doubtful that anyone but the British could have made this work, and what made it work was the traditional disinclination to invoke the vast powers they reserve for themselves. Whatever other virtues Peking might possess, a disinclination to invoke power is not one of them. Come 1997 Hong Kong will have a chief executive appointed by and accountable to China. Without a strong Legislative Council rooted in (if not elected by) the Hong Kong community, Hong Kong will have no autonomous institutions.

That is why China has objected not to any specific portion of the Patten plan but to the whole kit and caboodle. China has from the very outset opposed what it calls a "three-legged stool," i.e., giving Hong Kong a role in a matter that rightly should be decided solely by China and Britain.

In the process, however, China has revealed much about itself. Peking has attempted to bully Hong Kong into submission by deliberately driving the market down, calling into question the validity of contracts, and threatening British trade. This, of course, might be expected in a country that despite its economic openings still cannot bring itself to utter the word capitalism (the new preferred term is "market socialism with Chinese characteristics"). But it all comes at the same time China is busy trying to persuade the West that it should be readmitted to GATT, be awarded the 2000 Olympic Games, and see its Most Favored Nation status renewed.

Patten also enrages China personally. He could hardly be more different from his predecessor, Lord Wilson. A career Foreign Office man, fluent in Mandarin and diplomatic in bearing, Wilson was exactly the kind of barbarian the Chinese have been handling for centuries. Like so many others before him, Wilson started out believing his appreciation for the subtleties of Chinese culture would bring about a more reasonable Peking; he ended up locked in a perpetual kowtow. For Britain the last straw apparently came when John Major found himself reviewing a Chinese military guard on Tiananmen Square as the first Western leader to go there after the massacre--all to reach an airport deal that China would later renege on. Patten, fortunately, speaks no Chinese.

And so as the sun begins to set on the British Empire, the colonial government seems intent on leaving with a show of honor. Whether it will be enough to salvage a Hong Kong weakened by previous sellouts is hard to say, but it has given people here hope. It has also exposed Peking's true colors. In the early days of Communism Britain was viewed as the imperialist par excellence, the nation most responsible for China's humiliations. But four decades after seizing control the sons of Mao have come full circle, nailing to their door an order reminiscent of the worst of colonial Shanghai: "No dogs or Hong Kong Chinese allowed."