First Confession

by Chris Patten

  The toe-curling lack of any sense of honour or decency in some of the political and commercial lobbying was more than matched by the efforts made by some local commercial bigwigs to curry favour with mainland officials. The weather was changing as we got close to 1997, and the toads croaked. But these panjandrums could miscalculate badly. One concerned a local businessman with spectacularly Neanderthal political opinions. He ran an investment bank that crashed in flames in the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8. He had courted controversy on a number of occasions. In what many assumed was a joke, he had allegedly once offered the Conservative Party five million pounds to get rid of me; I was never sure whether he thought shooting me might be an option. Anyway, addressing the Hong Kong alumni of an American Business School one day in spring 1997, he attacked democracy fiercely, noting that the USA had done well until thirty years before it had become a real democracy, which seemed to mean when segregation was ended and black voters were registered. Few others went quite this far, at least publicly.

  Controversy about the relationship between courting China politically and success in, for instance, exporting to them or attracting Chinese inward investment continues to this day. It very rarely generates serious efforts to see whether there really is such a relationship. I have always believed that the Chinese do business on much the same basis as most others. They buy what they want and need at the best price with the best terms they can get; they invest where they can see a profit or a long-term commercial opportunity. If they can get away with putting the frighteners on potential trading partners by threatening dire consequences if a government supports criticisms of their human rights record or a Prime Minister meets the Dalai Lama, then I suppose one should not be too surprised at them for deploying this bit of triad-like protectionism. The criticism should be directed more against those who bow to bullying. When Michael Heseltine told John Major that taking a firm line with a Chinese visitor about Hong Kong risked destroying our trade relations with China, I noted in my diary in November 1996: ‘Fact: exports to China fell 25 per cent in the four years before my trade-wrecking arrival in Hong Kong. Fact: exports to China rose by 75 per cent in the four years since then. What does this prove? Not much. Only maybe that kow-towing doesn’t make much difference.’

  Having nosedived in the years preceding my arrival, Hong Kong’s exports did indeed gallop ahead after 1992, with our share of OECD exports as a whole growing faster than the average for this group of countries. All this proves is that, for all the threats, over time politics rarely has all that much effect on trade.fn2 On the relatively rare occasions when unacceptable commercial retaliation happens, the democratic partners of the offended country should work together in or outside the WTO to retaliate against, and put pressure on, China. They are usually too feeble to do this. Trading with China is always difficult, whatever the political situation. But you do not have to borrow from the Cradock rule book in order to succeed. According to journalists accompanying the Prime Minister and Cradock to China on the miserable and humiliating post-Tiananmen visit in 1990, undertaken in order to secure China’s support for building the new Hong Kong airport (with the territory’s own money), every time that John Major mentioned human rights Cradock told them afterwards that this was not serious but just for show. That behaviour does not win bigger trade deals. The Germans export a lot more to China than Britain does because the Germans make more things that the Chinese want to buy. It is high time for Britain and others to grow up about this issue, though China will not much care for it when we do.

  The verbal bombardment of Hong Kong by Chinese Communist Party officials clearly had little effect on the territory, whose economy cruised serenely on. Nor did it seem to have much effect on me, save (as I noted earlier) to make me appear a braver champion of democracy than I really was. I did not complain but observed others, like the Democratic legislators Martin Lee and Emily Lau, or Bishop Zen, who was to become the Catholic primate, who deserved the praise a great deal more. When I left Hong Kong, and became the European Commissioner for External Affairs responsible among other things for the EU relationship with the Chinese, that country’s officials as ever showed their pragmatism and treated me with considerable respect. At my first meeting with the Chinese foreign minister (Tang Jiaxuan) at the UN General Assembly in 1999, he said to me, ‘This time we should co-operate.’ ‘That’s what I wanted to do last time,’ I replied. A nice and chirpy man, he came to see me in Brussels on a kiss-and-make-up mission. The meeting got off to a bad start when he cracked a joke. I had a collection of photographs on the wall of my daughters. He took one look at them, guessed who they were and asked, ‘How come such beautiful young women have such an ugly father?’ His ambassador, reeling from what he feared might be taken at face value as an insult, interjected nervously, ‘It’s a joke, it’s a joke.’ I knew that, and it was quite a good one. Later in the meeting, the minister read word for word from a brief to announce that the leadership had considered my position and concluded that I was ‘a force for concord not discord’. Just to make sure that we had got the point, the Chinese embassy to the EU checked with my ‘Chef de Cabinet’ afterwards to ensure that he had taken the words down correctly.

  During my time in Brussels, I had a good, constructive relationship with Chinese officials, who always – such was my ancient infamy – knew who I was and usually wanted what we did not then call a ‘selfie’. I particularly enjoyed meetings with the premier Zhu Rongji (one of the most impressive officials I have ever met), usually about WTO access. At EU meetings with the Chinese, I was usually landed with handling the more contentious issues like human rights and – ridiculously, because it was really a matter in which member states were in the driving seat – arms sales to China, which had been suspended after Tiananmen. I recall Zhu recounting a conversation with a Falun Gong demonstrator, and his incomprehension at discovering that this believer put so much emphasis on what Zhu thought was spiritual ‘waffle’ rather than personal economic circumstances. His officials were horrified by the admission that he had even had this conversation. Even more memorable was a dispute about capital punishment, which turned into a sort of no-holds-barred students’ debate.

  I was invited for a private official visit with Lavender to China by the President, Jiang Zemin. After our meeting, mostly spent discussing old movies and Shakespeare, one of his staff asked me if I would sign a copy of my book East and West for him. This secretary had got hold of a pirated copy, printed in Taiwan, I noticed. I seemed to get on well enough with the last President, Hu Jintao, a very polite man, and am always greeted enthusiastically by Chinese groups in airport terminals and the like, which is good for my morale. But in recent years my critical remarks about China’s handling of Hong Kong affairs have fired up the communist vocabulary of abuse once again, not least on the part of China’s ambassador in London, who plainly dropped out of the class on charm and tact during his diplomatic training. It is rather worrying to assume that he goes on behaving as though he was taught by the Corleone family on the grounds that he normally gets away with it. All in all, however, it is still my view that trying to establish an open and mutually positive and beneficial relationship with China is fine; kowtowing to Chinese Leninism is not fine. Whether the arrival of a Trump presidency will smooth Chinese diplomacy at the edges will be a defining issue in international affairs in the next few years. On the face of things one needs to be an optimist to think that President Trump and President Xi will bring the best out in each other.

  The argument that democracy itself is alien to Asian culture is much more damaging to communities like Hong Kong than threats to limit trade if too much support is given to the indigenous development of pluralism. Hong Kong has invariably been caught up in the arguments about so-called Asian values, the claim that there are fundamental differences between cultures. The Asian identity brings with it, so it is said, a much weaker concern about individual rights and accountability, and a greater awareness of the importance of obedience to th
e family and the state.

  The distinction drawn between different civilizations obliges us to put on one side the overlaps and the cultural cross-fertilization between countries and continents. Anyone with an awareness of Christian history knows that the first thrust of Christian evangelism was from Palestine east into western Asia. Medievalists have taught us how much Islam shaped European society and learning. Many of the founding classical texts of Christian society in Europe came to early-Renaissance cities and universities through the agency of Arabic scholarship. Similar stories can be told about other civilizations. Asia itself – 30 per cent of the world’s total surface area and over 60 per cent of the world’s population – is actually a European concept and indeed word, from the initial involvement of Herodotus and other classical writers. Over the years this European view has changed from seeing in Asia an other-worldly disdain for utilitarian matters of commerce and technology, to regarding the continent as a world-beating global workshop. Reflecting the earlier views about 150 years ago, Matthew Arnold wrote:

  The brooding East with awe beheld

  Her impious younger world.

  The Roman tempest swelled and swelled,

  And on her head was hurled.

  The East bowed low before the blast

  In patient, deep disdain;

  She let the legions thunder past,

  And plunged in thought again.

  Arnold’s view of Asian culture and values was a long way from today’s Shanghai or Singapore. There is today more commercial thunder in the East than thoughtful disdain.

  The rather silly argument about Asian values, much devalued by the Asian financial crash of 1997–8, was given some intellectual heft by the father of the Singapore city state, Lee Kuan Yew, and his acolytes. Despite other Asian politicians and thinkers like the Korean Nobel Peace Prize Winner, President Kim Dae-Jung, the Nobel Economics Laureate Amartya Sen, and the disgracefully incarcerated Malaysian political leader Anwar Ibrahim, putting the contrary view, Lee’s arguments secured for a time a good deal of support. Today, long after his death, they are still repeated in Singapore as an act of filial loyalty. These nostrums provided a useful cover for authoritarianism, both soft and hard, and an excuse for Western businessmen and politicians not to allow issues like torture and the suppression of freedom of speech to get in the way of trying to do business. For these disciples, the Asian-values argument was that human rights and democracy were bad for economic development and that keeping them in chains had been the reason for Asia’s booming economies. The undoubted success of Lee’s own small economy was taken as the necessary, almost sufficient, proof of the truth of these propositions. There was, it was argued, a preference in Asia for the collective and for harmony over individual initiative and endeavour. Figures of authority deserved and received loyalty and respect. Civil and political rights were matters which Asian communities should deal with themselves without external interference. In Singapore, the British barrister Anthony Lester said they liked the forms of democracy but not their values. This was not Confucian. Nor was it uniquely Asian. It was just authoritarian: a touch of Sparta in the Orient.

  I have never been convinced that Singapore’s success depended on vigorously refuting any criticism of its first leader and his family. Singapore pursued effective economic and social policies with a lot more social engineering and central direction than I would normally find attractive. It had a great port and a hub position in a booming region. Given my economic liberalism, I was pleased by those American economic studies in the 1990s that showed a higher rate of return on investments in Hong Kong, where there was no industrial strategy but a free economy, than in Singapore, and that our Interpol crime figures were better than Singapore’s (even though we did not hang or cane offenders). Lee Kuan Yew was a remarkable man and I have never doubted Singapore’s success. But I do not believe that this validates an inherently absurd argument, nor that the Singapore model would necessarily have worked on a larger stage.

  I presume that Lee Kuan Yew developed the ‘Asian values’ argument for four reasons. First, he was keen to fend off criticism that Singapore was an American poodle in the region. Second, he wanted to deflect criticism of his authoritarian style and the extent to which the institutions of plural governance that he created had some of the characteristics of Potemkin villages. Yes, there were parliamentary elections but what chance a government defeat? Yes, there were courts but how strong was the rule of law?fn3 The third reason was that it enabled him to warm up his relations with China, even while staying on friendly terms with Taiwan, which had embraced democracy. Fourth, he claimed ancient confirmation of his approach by digging up the roots of his philosophy in a somewhat partial perusal of the Analects of Confucius.

  Just consider for a moment some of the absurdities of the overall argument. Marketed as Asian values, it has to cover an awful lot of political and cultural ground from dictatorships in Central Asia to the largest world democracy in India to Stone Age totalitarianism in North Korea. Inconveniently, India is not only a rumbustious democracy but, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, embraced political tolerance under King Ashoka in the third century BC and Emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century AD. India had already established a rich tradition of tolerance and debate when Europeans still believed in the divine right of kings. Even if you narrow the field and look at East Asia alone, you have to contend with totally different sorts of government from (to be polite) guided democracy in Singapore, to Leninism with capitalist characteristics in China to democratic South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, and to aspirations for democracy in Hong Kong. Are the Taiwanese democrats or the Hong Kong aspirants for democracy less Confucian than get-rich-as-quick-as-possible capitalists in Beijing or Shanghai? What are the principal Confucian values exemplified in Shenzhen or in the spectacular number of those helping the anti-corruption police with their inquiries in the People’s Republic? In the Analects, Zilu asks the Master how to serve a prince. Confucius replies, ‘Tell him the truth even if it offends him.’ The subtleties of Confucius are ignored by those who want to turn him into an excuse for iron-clad patrician authoritarianism. The governor of She says to Confucius, ‘Among my people there is a man of unbending integrity. When his father stole a sheep he denounced him.’ ‘Among my people,’ replies the Master, ‘men of integrity do things differently; a father covers up for his son, a son covers up for his father, and there is integrity in what they do.’

  The central fallacy in the Asian-values clash-of-civilizations argument is that it denies the universality of human rights. As the UN Declaration on Human Rights asserted, after the barbarities that preceded it and took place during the Second World War, human beings have the same individual rights, regardless of race, religion, nation or location. They are entitled to a fair trial, to due process, to free speech, to freedom from torture or enslavement. It hurts the same to be tortured in an Asian police cell or to be water boarded in a US military base. Denial of free speech leads to the same calamities in every society – to corruption, bad government, economic crimes and further abuses, all of which China has conspicuously suffered under communism (and some of which it suffered before). The most successful societies are those that combine inclusive economic policies and inclusive political structures.

  There is a further reason for throwing the arguments about Asian values overboard. They assume that democracy and human rights are principally Western (European or American) concerns and by implication they suggest that this is how the West always behaves. But we know that the West’s record on all this is patchy. No one can look back at the history of the first half of the twentieth century and regard it as a successful example of the West’s practice of pluralism, accountability and the rule of law. The West has no monopoly of virtue in governance. Nor does the West avoid hypocrisy in the way it stands up for what it purports to believe. We are often all as bad as one another. Looking through my Hong Kong diaries I can find references to French ministers appearing to put cognac sales above
‘les droits de l’homme’ and Germans giving priority to car exports. Were they joking? And what about Britain, recently launched (so ministers claimed) on an apparently ‘golden age’ of relations with China. President Xi Jinping, lauded on a state visit to London, while he cracked down on any sign of dissent at home? Did any British minister protest loudly enough to be heard? The Joint Declaration and Basic Law have been breached – for example, with abductions of Hong Kong citizens by mainland officials and some erosion of the territory’s legal autonomy – yet there have been very few squeals of disapproval from London.

  A question near the heart of the Asian-values debate is whether you have to be Western to be modern. I have never believed this to be true, partly because so many of the physical manifestations of modernity are designed and manufactured in the East. Visit the most sophisticated computer laboratories or back-office outsourcing companies in Bangalore or Poona and count the saris; look at the modishness – their very own hipsterism – of young Japanese in Tokyo and the sophistication of their retail industries; visit a school in Shanghai or Seoul and admire the intellectual firepower of the students, their familiarity with every aspect of information technology. The issue is not ‘modernness’ but the sustainability of economic success, of competitiveness and of a decent society where individual rights are protected and the public good is at the same time asserted. In the years after the Second World War these attributes were more frequently found in Europe, North America and Australasia. But they were not exclusive to these countries; nor were civic values their intellectual invention. A civic consciousness, a sense of what it is to be a good citizen, and what government should do to protect and develop that notion, helps to shape a country’s ideal of itself. This is far more a hallmark of identity than some largely made-up idea of civilizational behaviour.