This chapter looks at the Thatcher government’s approach to democratic promotion in China and Hong Kong, and its responses to the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. It was the neoliberal assumption that economic reform would lead to political liberalisation in China. But as this chapter argues, Thatcher was a ‘pragmatic neoliberal’, who held an instrumental view of democracy and preferred evolutionary change to radical revolution. In the wake of Tiananmen, Britain pursued a ‘dual-track’ approach by condemning but not isolating China. Thatcher and British diplomats stuck to a policy of engagement with China, not least due to Britain’s responsibility to Hong Kong up till 1997. The second section of this chapter examines how, since 1984, the Thatcher government had been accelerating the development of representative government in Hong Kong, which was regarded as the most effective weapon against Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong affairs after 1997. The drafting of the Basic Law since 1985, and then the 1989 Tiananmen crisis, sharpened the debates on the pace and scope of democratisation in Hong Kong. Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of globalisation did not include democratisation. For all their contending visions of globalisation, both Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping were pragmatic enough to restore normalcy in Anglo-Chinese relations not long after the June Fourth killings, and to accommodate Hong Kong opinion by guaranteeing a degree of democracy in the Basic Law.