CHINA seriously considered invading Hong Kong in the middle of talks with Margaret Thatcher in 1982, a former top Chinese official has disclosed.

The Chinese were ready to resort to “requisition by force” if the negotiations had set off unrest in the colony, said Lu Ping, who later headed negotiations with Chris Patten, the last governor.

Thatcher said later that Deng Xiaoping, then China’s leader, told her directly: “I could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon.”

She replied that China would lose everything if it did. “There is nothing I could do to stop you,” she said, “but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like.”

Only now has Lu confirmed that the Chinese were not bluffing. He said Deng feared that announcing the date for the 1997 handover would provoke serious unrest in Hong Kong and China would have to invade.

The Thatcher-Deng talks in Beijing came shortly after Britain’s reconquest of the Falklands. The harsh tenor of the negotiations left British officials such as Sir Percy Cradock, Thatcher’s principal adviser, badly shaken.

Thatcher flew on to Hong Kong, she recalled, with a sense of foreboding. Britain and China eventually agreed to a joint declaration that Hong Kong would return to China but could enjoy its own freedoms for 50 years.

The compromise led Cradock and Patten to exchange barbed remarks in the 1990s over how to handle the Chinese. The governor thought the mandarin feeble and the mandarin thought the governor reckless.

Throughout the last years of British rule Patten continued to push for greater democracy before Britain handed its last Asian possession back to China on 30 June, 1997, 10 years ago next weekend.

Lu, who had an espionage network in Hong Kong, was well informed about the divisions on the British side.

Patten called him “infinitely courteous” in their private exchanges but Lu memorably told the Chinese media that Patten would be seen as “a sinner for a thousand years”.

Since the handover Hong Kong has kept its freedom of speech and commerce but China has stifled any efforts to bring one-man, one-vote democracy to the 7m people who live there.

Lu’s disclosures will be taken by Cradock and veteran Foreign Office Sinologists as proving the wisdom of their heavily criticised policy to appease China before the peaceful transfer of power.

In 1989 Deng proved that he would use force when he ordered tanks to crush democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

To show that the Chinese were deadly serious long before that Lu also revealed that a radical faction of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was poised to invade the British colony during pro-communist riots in 1967.

The invasion was called off only by a late-night order from Premier Zhou Enlai to the local army commander, Lu said.

Lu’s remarks were made in an interview with Dragon TV, a Chinese broadcaster. His claims have been backed by Zhou Nan, another former senior Chinese official in Hong Kong, who says in a forthcoming memoir that Beijing considered “non-peaceful means” to achieve reunification.

The Lu disclosures mark the first time a senior Chinese figure has commented on the 1967 convulsions, when British authorities almost lost control of the colony to rioters inspired by Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution.

Lu said Huang Yongsheng, PLA commander in the province across the border, suggested an invasion to stop the chaos.

British naval and military forces were far too small to put up more than token resistance. Their officers knew that in 1941 a garrison of 14,000 had not been enough to prevent the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese.

Things came within a hair’s breadth of disaster for the British. Unknown to them Huang was a leading member of a group headed by Lin Piao, Mao’s designated heir.

“A well-known womaniser, he soon became Mrs Lin’s lover,” say the authors, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in their recent biography of Mao. Lin’s cabal believed in the violent export of Maoism and were ready to seize any opportunity for a military strike that would delight patriots and confound moderate rivals.

But on this occasion their chief foe, Premier Zhou, retained enough authority to order the PLA to stand down, saving Britain from almost certain defeat and the loss of Hong Kong. Huang rose to become army chief of staff. He was purged after the fall and death of Lin Piao in 1971. The man who wanted to invade Hong Kong was given a show trial and sent to prison. He died in April 1983.

Times Recommends

• LA profits from Michael Jackson stimulus
• Berlusconi's absent wife causes G8 headache
• Chimps that took a punishing step for Man