by Chris Patten
I was not a complete stranger to Hong Kong and China. I first went to the colony in 1979, when I was a young backbench MP. On my return I wrote an article for the Guardian advocating the introduction of elections for local government there. This did not please the then Governor, a stern chieftain, who thought that popular political pressure could best be dealt with by housing and welfare programmes. He drove through ambitious schemes with great energy and determination, dealing with floods of refugees from the mainland. Lord Maclehose was a clever man, no one’s stooge. It used to be said when he was Governor that he and the Maltese Prime Minister, Dom Mintoff, were the most unpopular men in the Foreign Office; that spoke well for his independent mind. But he was not at all interested in anyone’s democratic aspirations to run their own affairs. He was a civilized, unbending Scot who thought he knew what was right for Hong Kong, and that he could best manage its relations with Beijing. How much his own initiative, eighteen years before the hand-over, in raising quite so explicitly with Deng Xiaoping questions concerning Hong Kong’s position after 1997 reflected the Cabinet’s views has never been wholly clear to me. I liked him – after all he was another Balliol man with a taste for dry martinis – but I was never under any illusion about what he would think about even modest efforts at democratic reform. Unlike some others, however, he did not seek to bad-mouth me or stab me in the back.
I had also been to China on a number of occasions, particularly when I was Minister of Overseas Development. In that role I attended the Asia Development Bank (ADB) meeting in May 1989 in Beijing. We were there until about a week before Deng and the other elderly Communist Party leaders sent in the tanks to crush the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China. With the square and other public spaces overflowing with demonstrators during our ADB meetings, the atmosphere felt like a Glastonbury Festival of freedom and democracy. I have never before or since felt so close to history being made. Sadly, it turned out to be the wrong history. I played one very minor role in the proceedings. The senior ministers attending the ADB meeting were invited to a discussion with Zhao Ziyang, the reform-minded party secretary-general. We sat around asking polite questions about agricultural reform and the role of market forces in China, while our thoughts were on what was happening outside on the streets. Eventually, after an hour or so of these slightly surreal routine exchanges, I asked the question on all our minds: what was happening outside and how would it be resolved? Zhao pulled a card from his pocket and gave a short, passionate lecture which sounded very like the speech that he subsequently gave to the students in the middle of the night in Tiananmen Square, and which would expedite his downfall. He expressed sympathy for the students and workers, hoped that they would give up their hunger strike before they damaged their health, and promised a dialogue with them. Alas, events took a brutal turn. The tanks rolled in; many were killed; and the subsequent crackdown on any dissident activity was tougher than anything that has happened in China until the recent repressive measures of Xi Jinping. As was the case with the much later democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2014, it is difficult for demonstrators in what are strategically unplanned events to know when to back off, having won not just a place on the moral high ground but a position from which, a little later, further advances could probably be made. To activists, tactical withdrawals and regroupings look like appeasement and surrender. But, though difficult to time and to organize, they are often the sensible short-term course, and sometimes the sensible long-term one too.
So I had some bruising and disappointing experiences of Chinese politics. The effect of the murder of Chinese students and others in 1989 – called by one of the Communist Party’s businessmen poodles in Hong Kong ‘the kerfuffle’ – was to raise the alarm in Hong Kong about what the return to Chinese sovereignty there only eight years later might presage. The movement to speed up the democratization of Hong Kong became understandably much stronger. The Joint Declaration, an international treaty signed by Britain and China in 1984, with a fifty-year life from 1997, and the Basic Law, which was a Chinese constitution for Hong Kong based on the treaty, were supposed to guarantee Hong Kong’s freedom and the way of life of the colony after Beijing had resumed sovereignty. What would ensure that the Chinese complied with all this? This must have been of special concern to Sir Percy Cradock, a former ambassador to China, who had assumed a role as the Cardinal of the Holy Office on all matters affecting ‘the middle kingdom’. Cradock had once said of Chinese Communist Party officials, ‘They were thugs, are thugs and always will be thugs.’ So what do you do with ‘thugs’ (not a noun I have ever used about Chinese leaders)? Do you pay them off whenever they come calling reminding you, as they tend to do, of all those who had not paid a ‘pizzo’ and now slept with the fishes? That seemed to be the Cardinal’s view. You accepted a regular shakedown as part of normal diplomatic practice, trying to make it through your own demeanour a little less unbecoming.
Intellectually and politically, Sir Percy resisted what his political masters assured the world, and especially Hong Kong: that Britain would make certain that Hong Kong retained its pluralism and its freedom. He was not the only mandarin who wanted to be emperor or at least exercise imperial authority from behind the throne. Though he was a very clever man, he was one of those quite rare officials who never really accept where a civil servant’s authority ends and a democratically elected politician’s takes over.
After signature of the Joint Declaration, whatever had happened before, the British government’s policy was now clear. Hong Kong was to become democratic. Democracy would steadily take root and give people the means to defend themselves against any erosion of their liberties. This was said publicly and privately in Parliament and outside. I have always been surprised by those who suggest that we should take no notice of promises made in the House of Commons. The declared British policy was the all-purpose reply to those who worried that Britain’s last imperial gesture was to be the handing over of a free society to the last great totalitarian power in the world, with more sleight of hand in the process than transparency. This was the backdrop to my arrival in Hong Kong as the last Governor.
I have already set out in truncated form some of my experience as Governor of Hong Kong, the most interesting and worthwhile five years of my life, and I do not intend to beat through the shrubbery over all these issues again, despite the continuing occasional squawks of rage from the Cradock acolytes who still carry a torch for his approach to China. To them any alternative attitude has to be demolished lest its success, or even partial success, raises questions about the effectiveness as well as the morality of what went before. But it is important to sketch out the bare bones of the story of the thwarting of democratic development in Hong Kong because of its relevance to my arguments about identity. First, there is the question of whether so-called Asian values include any concern for political accountability and human rights or whether there is an inevitable ‘clash of civilizations’ between the East and the West. Second, there is the matter of whether civic values can become an important part of identity, helping to shape it. Third, it is worth considering how far the Chinese leadership’s incomprehension about the meaning of a free society limits its clout in the world, despite the size of its population and hence of its economy.
Why was Hong Kong not already well on the road to democracy, let alone to being a fully democratic society, well before Britain’s departure from responsibility for this great city? One characteristic of efforts to introduce more popular accountability and more involvement of Chinese citizens in Hong Kong’s government, during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, was the resistance of the British business community. Events in the region – wars in China and the military adventurism of Japan – also argued against political change in a colony that was always regarded in London as rather different from Britain’s other dependencies, more trading post than settled community. A big push for democracy under Governor Young after the Second World War was
thwarted by nervousness about the consequences of the collapse of the Kuomintang (KMT) government in China and the advance of the Communist Party. Local business, colonial officials and Whitehall readily accepted the argument that introducing democracy in Hong Kong would divide the community along the lines of the communist–KMT conflict on the mainland. Beijing itself was unsurprisingly nervous about any democratic moves in Hong Kong too. For instance, in 1958, with decolonization picking up speed in Africa, Zhou Enlai sent a message to the then British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, expressing the worry that Britain might be pushing the colony along the road to independence like Singapore. Britain should not change Hong Kong’s constitutional status, which America (the Chinese believed) would welcome as a means of weakening China. Beijing’s apprehensions helped strengthen the hand of those in the colony and in London who advised against change.
The 1960s and 1970s were dominated by an influx of refugees to Hong Kong from the mainland, riots in 1966 against colonial government, and Maoist riots in 1967 in organized sympathy for the Cultural Revolution. But these decades also witnessed Hong Kong’s increasing economic vitality, the result of free-trade policies, surplus cheap labour and the booming Asian economies in its neighbourhood. As the countdown to the inevitable transfer of sovereignty in 1997 began to dictate the pace of events, the arguments about democracy resurfaced. They became part of the basis of the negotiations on the Joint Declaration with the promise that Hong Kong would have a legislature constituted by elections to which the executive would be accountable. The then Governor, Teddy Youde, tried bravely to push through practical ways of achieving this in 1984–5 with the introduction of a steadily increasing number of directly elected legislators. He was thwarted by opposition from Beijing, the local business community and the Cradock votaries. Youde died in 1986 and in a subsequent consultation exercise, allegedly to discover the Hong Kong public’s wishes on the pace of introducing direct elections for the legislature, a clear majority in favour of a faster pace for democratization was morphed, with not very well-disguised sharp practice, into a victory of the minority for going slower. If the ‘thirty-year rule’ leads to the release of all the papers and telegrams for this period, I do not believe that London will emerge from this episode with much credit. Perhaps some of these papers have already slipped down the back of a sofa. Summarizing in my Hong Kong diary the questions that I put to the Foreign Office in 1997 about the papers for this period that I had seen while clearing out old government material for return to London, I wrote, ‘we told the Chinese that they shouldn’t underestimate the pressure for direct elections just because the consultation exercise purported to show there wasn’t great support for them. The whole business was an essay in trying to avoid a row with China rather than respond to the demands for more democracy in Hong Kong. If we’d done more then we’d have had almost a decade of developing representative government under our belts before the hand-over. At best the exercise was cynical.’ In short, Britain behaved badly because it wanted that ‘smooth’ transition and no rocking of the boat.
When I went to Hong Kong in 1992, my briefing on the question of democratic development was pretty limited. Naturally I read the parliamentary debates about the negotiations over the transfer of sovereignty in Hong Kong. I was struck by the weight of argument that it would be the steady introduction of democracy that would really guarantee Hong Kong’s future freedom. One of the strongest proponents of this point of view was Edward Heath. In the history of decolonization, he said, we had always tended to go too slowly in pressing ahead with democratization. In Hong Kong we should go faster than the government seemed to envisage. He repeated these arguments after the Tiananmen killings in 1989. But I am afraid that, at some stage between then and my arrival in Hong Kong in 1992, other counsels – I wonder whether they could have been Chinese – had overwhelmed Heath’s democratic spirit. When I was Governor, he would regularly invite himself to stay so he could spend a week going around Hong Kong telling everyone prepared to listen how stupid and confrontational I was being in my dealings with China. He would then depart, with a wintry expression of gratitude, for Beijing, before repeating the whole tiresome exhibition of unhelpful ill-manners the following year.
Before leaving for the colony I also had a large amount of rather general briefing about the agreed electoral arrangements. For his part, Percy Cradock in two or three discussions simply told me in his austere but lordly way that everything was clearly set out in the Chinese Basic Law for Hong Kong. This specified what should be done, including the number of directly elected legislators to be allowed. In the proposals I set out when I arrived in Hong Kong I did not try to overturn this but simply attempted to use every bit of flexibility allowed to make the electoral arrangements as broadly democratic as possible. So, for instance, I greatly enlarged the numbers who could vote in the so-called functional constituencies which represented business and professional interests, and made the District Boards (local government) fully democratic. Shortly after I announced these plans, Lee Kuan Yew gave an interview in which he applauded my deepening of democracy and the ingenious way in which I had filled in the spaces left in the Basic Law and the Joint Declaration. When I had seen him on my way to Hong Kong he told me to set out my agenda very clearly at the outset and stick to it. This is what I tried to do, and also to entrench Hong Kong’s rule of law and protection of human rights. In response to this rather modest advance in accountability (well short of the demands of local Democrat Party legislators), Chinese verbal pyrotechnics turned me into a champion of democracy akin to Tom Paine. It was not meant as a compliment, and it would certainly not have been deserved. But China’s barrage of abuse secured some traction, gaining the surprising approval of both Prime Minister Lee and much of the British business community (though not the American) in Hong Kong. My greatest crime, I have reflected subsequently, was to decline to be either a lame or a Peking duck. Moreover, in a constant and deliberate effort to engage in what a member of my Executive Council called ‘tutorial government’, I constantly emphasized the relationship between Hong Kong’s civic values and its economic success. I also tried to take the stuffiness out of the gubernatorial role, did public question-and-answer sessions on radio and at public meetings, gave broadcasts once a month on issues related to governance, and made speeches about Hong Kong’s way of life and what made it special.
Did the rows with China over pluralism damage Hong Kong? The economy continued to grow. Every year we cut taxes, increased spending not least on social programmes, saw our reserves increase, developed our infrastructure, almost completed a new airport (paid for largely out of revenues, not borrowing), created more jobs, and brought inflation and crime down to ten-year lows. Hong Kong remained stable; there was no social breakdown or political chaos. Any demonstrations against the government – and there were few – involved hundreds not thousands of people. We left Hong Kong without the territory or Britain facing international obloquy. Most of my local and expatriate advisers in 1992 and 1993, when I first arrived, argued that we should stand fast on the commitment to democracy. They had been obliged to negotiate for years without a bottom line and had seen the consequences. Their conclusion after all these dramas was that, whether you have a bottom line or not, the Chinese behave in the same way. I described it in my diary in September 1996 after one of our negotiators had suffered what he called a ‘grisly’ encounter with his opposite number. ‘Others, while wanting to get the best for their own side, do at least search for some acceptable compromise or accommodation. But the Chinese were only interested in getting their own way. They’ll hold on, even if they intend to do a deal, until the eleventh hour and beyond trying to extract last-minute concessions. And if they can’t win everything, they’ll try to ensure that the text of an agreement gives them enough elbow room to reopen every matter they want subsequently … The rest of the world should really know how to play hard ball with them. At present they get away with a negotiating style that combines the tac
tics of the Mafia and of every barrack room lawyer with a good dollop of straightforward duplicity thrown in for good measure.’
This is called ‘the struggle school of diplomacy’. Struggle or not, I concluded that at least if we had a bottom line we would be able to hold our heads up and make it easier to govern Hong Kong. So we struggled diplomatically, but not in governing the territory: a better all-round bargain. As we got closer to 1997, one of my advisers used to argue that Hong Kong was like a Rolls-Royce. The Chinese wanted to tinker with the engine and change the tyres, but all they really needed to do was turn on the ignition and away she’d go.
Some argued that this whole approach hurt Britain’s business interests in Hong Kong and in China. Even some former Conservative ministers like Lord Young, now working (not always hugely successfully) as company chairmen or directors, were not above telling whoever wanted to listen in Hong Kong or London that democracy was not all that it was cracked up to be and that rows with China undermined business opportunities. Democracy was often blamed when the culprits were actually bad management decisions. Local Chinese companies ran rings around some of the old British ‘hongs’ and mainland Chinese officials regularly took their distinguished British visitors to the cleaners. (A good piece of advice from those at the sharp end of commercial negotiations was never to allow the company chairman near the talks.) Douglas Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary, once noted, ‘There are people who stay at the Mandarin Hotel and listen to a few people and think they know Hong Kong. They don’t see that what is actually happening inside that amazing society is change. And when it is put under their noses they don’t like it because life would be much easier if everything went on as before and there were no politics in Hong Kong. There are politics in Hong Kong and ministers have to take account of that the way that taipans don’t have to.’