First Confession

by Chris Patten

  In the 1990s, Hong Kong had all the freedoms and protections of a plural society except the right to choose its own government. Sooner or later this had to come as well. People were taught about freedom, and, moreover, they practised it – not in an abstract way but freedom specifically to do this and to do that. They were never going to accept that the one thing they could not do was to choose how accountability could be assured. It was absurd for some, especially but not exclusively in the business community, to argue that a colonial Governor had introduced politics to a previously apolitical community. Hong Kong is sophisticated and well-educated with two or three of the fifty best universities in the world. A large part of its community comprises refugees from the often savage politics of mainland China. Political demands were not foisted on Hong Kong. What is true is that they were sharpened by fears of the Chinese Communist Party’s plans for Hong Kong, and that a moderate movement for democracy was to a limited extent radicalized by attempts to suppress it.

  Efforts since 1997 to politicize Hong Kong’s fine civil service, and to bend the equally good police force to securing political objectives, must have had some effect, even if only to blur ideas of the meaning of public service. The rule of law and the independence of the judiciary have nevertheless survived despite some minatory noises from Beijing. Civil society also remains strong, the churches too. Yet freedom of speech has been snipped away by commercial manoeuvres and physical assault. Citizens have been abducted from Hong Kong streets and taken to the mainland because they displeased the authorities there. Recently questions have been raised about both university autonomy and academic freedom, partly because of the extent to which the democracy movement in 2014 (the so-called Umbrella Revolution) appeared to spring from universities and schools.

  This extraordinary display of democratic zeal in the autumn of 2014 was triggered by Beijing’s imposition of control over the arrangements for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive, the restriction of the candidates for this post to people the Chinese leadership thought they could trust to toe the line. The Chinese Communist Party was determined not to risk losing its handle on the process twenty years after the change in sovereignty which had been accompanied by Beijing’s clampdown on the development of democracy in the legislature. Most of the world – except in China where the news was blocked – watched the demonstrations with surprise and admiration. The young people who formed the core of the protests acted on the whole with courtesy and restraint. They helped one another with their homework; they drew up rosters of duties to make the demonstrations as acceptable as possible to others; they cleaned up the litter. Some of the policing of the demonstrations and the organized use of triads and paid-by-the-day bullies to break up the demonstrations brought shame on the authorities.

  It was a slur on the integrity and principles of Hong Kong’s citizens to assert, as the Chinese government’s propaganda machine did, that they were being manipulated by outside forces. What motivated Hong Kong’s tens of thousands of demonstrators – many if not most of whom had grown up after the reversion to Chinese sovereignty – was a passionate belief that they should be able to run their affairs as they were promised, choosing those who govern them in free and fair elections. These peaceful demonstrators, with their umbrellas, their refuse collection bags, their passionately held beliefs, could not be swept off the street like garbage, or permanently bullied into submission by tear gas and pepper spray. Young and old, they represented the city’s future. Their hopes were for a peaceful and prosperous life in which they could enjoy the freedom and rule of law that they were promised. This is not only in the interests of their city. It is in China’s interest too. Although it did not of course intend this, what the Chinese Communist Party has done is to bake into Hong Kong’s life a real sense of citizenship. Increasingly, Hong Kong’s feelings about its own identity have not been to accept or even reject Chinese-ness but to assert Hong Kong Chinese-ness. This has been a real and lasting development which the Communist Party needs to recognize. The fact that it finds it so hard to do this strikes at the heart of China’s biggest existential problem, the lack of a civil ethic which draws together economic interests, political aspirations and patriotism. Unfortunately but predictably, China’s garrison mentality not only strengthens the idea of Hong Kong citizenship, but pushes this idea so far as to drive some more radical voters over the edge into unwise calls for independence. This further enflames the situation.

  Just before I visited Hong Kong in November 2016, two years after the extraordinarily impressive democracy demonstrations, I rediscovered the whole text of the diary that I had kept when I was Governor, and occasionally referred to earlier in this chapter. Rummaging through the stories of old administrative adventures, political news, meetings with world leaders, and accounts of the sheer enjoyment of living in Hong Kong, as in effect the mayor of a great Asian city, two things struck me forcefully.

  First, in the summer of 1996, I record one or two minor incidents of hostility towards expatriates on the part of the local Cantonese. The wonder was not that there was some hostility, but that there was not more. Yes, we had done much good, creating institutions which worked. Colonialism could not be defended at the end of the twentieth century, but in Hong Kong we British had been pretty decent. We had provided a haven for all those refugees from the tumultuous events on the mainland after the revolution – the totalitarian brutalities, the cultural revolution, famine, and so on – but even the least sensitive Chinese must have encountered behaviour that offended them, being patronized by a small ruling minority, from time to time. Why was there not more of this quite mild bitterness? Presumably the answer is that there were many more British people who behaved well, who were not patronizing, who did not humiliate others, and who loved the community of which they were a part, who loved it as much as I did and my family did, and who knew how much we had to be grateful for. Hong Kong was not British, but we had played a part in creating it and we thought it unique. Chinese Hong Kong with some British attributes.

  The extent to which this was implicitly recognized in Deng Xiaoping’s famous aim for China and Hong Kong – ‘one country, two systems’ – perhaps underlines the failure of Beijing to understand its own principles and policy. Yes, Hong Kong was and is part of China; its citizens are Chinese citizens. But what exactly is the system that gives them a distinctive identity? It is a belief in pluralism under the rule of law; an enthusiasm for accountability; a recognition of the relationship between civic freedoms, security, stability and prosperity. People in Hong Kong have this sense of citizenship. Beijing communists cannot both assert the existence of two systems and then contend that men and women in Hong Kong have exactly the same political personality as the Chinese on the mainland, that they are carbon copies. If that were true then ‘one country, two systems’ would be wholly meaningless.

  As modern colonialists, we had tried to safeguard these differences. I do not believe that in the 1990s we deserved to be run out of town with abuse ringing in our ears for failing to do so; nor did this happen. But going back in 2016 I found myself being asked again and again what should happen next to Hong Kong’s governance. Denied a sensible dialogue about the political future by a pretty hopeless, cloth-eared government, aware of increasing pressure on its autonomy from the mainland’s communists, some in the Democratic camp had moved the debate on from calls for rather greater democracy to demands for independence for Hong Kong, an impossible and (for Beijing) incendiary demand that would dilute support for democracy, play into the hands of the communist hardliners and throw away international understanding. I spoke in these terms, not least to hundreds of university students. They were polite but firm: what will happen, they asked, if they got nothing from Beijing except more interference in their autonomy? What would Britain and others do? What, one bright student asked, had we done in the past for previous generations of democracy activists? I blundered through an unconvincing reply. When I got home to England, I recalled a passage in
my diary about one of the democracy activists with whom I had had to deal, ‘X annoys me – with those savage sound-bites denouncing Britain, but I admire the guts and eloquence – X has at bottom a devastating strong moral case.’ Did we ever have a real sense of our moral responsibility? Is any idea of honour old-fashioned, something a country loses when it is in inevitable decline, unsure of its role and values? At the very least those of us who loved Hong Kong and did not behave too badly when we had the privilege of being its transitory citizens should feel some responsibility for its liberty and welfare in the future. Those students deserve that of us; but, then, so did their parents. As this book was in preparation in March 2017, a new chief executive was chosen by Beijing’s trustees, who was drawing only half the support of one of the other candidates in the polls. His fault in Beijing’s eyes was plainly that he had advocated dialogue with the democracy activists. One country, with Beijing increasingly hell-bent on one system.

  The sheer size of China, once it rejoined the world economy in the 1980s, has inevitably led to a tilt back towards Asia in global affairs, particularly since it follows hard on the heels of the economic rise of Japan and of the Tiger economies of Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, and the slower, less steady opening of India to the rest of the world. When over 60 per cent of the world’s population starts to get richer, the effects are dramatic. Europe has about 7 per cent of the world’s population, Asia over 60 per cent, America about 5 per cent. Sheer aggregate numbers multiplied by growing figures for GDP per head really started to shift things towards the East even when country by country the GDP per head was and is usually much higher in the West. Perhaps we are at or even past the moment when the world starts to spin off in another direction; maybe modern history has just started anew.

  Looking back, there was a huge tipping point in the world after 1500. Until then India and China represented about 50 per cent of the world’s output. Between then and the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, the West began to overtake, and through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries India and China fell far behind, partly because of their own acts of omission and commission and partly because of colonial exploitation by Europe, Japan and even America. By the 1970s, China and India together accounted for less than 10 per cent of world output. Since then the figures have changed dramatically, especially for China. This has resulted in bookshops full of volumes predicting the End of the West and the Triumph of the Rest.

  To borrow Samuel Beckett’s favourite word: ‘perhaps’. I accept that America and Europe no longer rule the roost in the way they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But I find it difficult to accept that exponentialism is about to hand the century ahead to Asia, especially when so much of the argument depends on the continuing hectic growth of China. But let me start with the back half of the Chindian colossus: India, a country which I regard as the most interesting in the world, unlikely as it is to become a conventional superpower any time soon.

  India has a population of 1.3 billion, second only to China. This is predicted to exceed China’s population of 1.38 billion by 2022, and to hit 1.6 billion by 2050. India’s population is younger than China’s: more than 50 per cent of Indians are below the age of twenty-five. As China’s workforce ages – moving from labour surplus to labour shortage faster than any economy ever before – India will have many more economically active men and women. India encompasses a dazzling variety of ethnic groups, religions and languages. It is also home to the largest number of poor people in the world: over one fifth of its total population, more than half its households, have no modern sanitary facilities. After independence in 1947, India’s government drew up a constitution which incorporated democracy, secularism and socialism. The democracy and secularism have worked pretty well. While there have been religious flare-ups between racial and religious groups – especially Hindus and Muslims, who murdered one another in large numbers when Pakistan and India split apart – overall India has coped with potentially explosive tensions through the safety valve of democracy. Without this, in all likelihood, it would have shattered. Socialism did not have a good record in India, condemning it for about four decades to what Indians themselves called the Hindu rate of growth, much lower than what was being achieved elsewhere in Asia. Since India started to strip back the over-regulation and bureaucracy associated with the ‘licence Raj’, growth has picked up, as it needed to, and from the 1990s on India has become steadily more integrated in the global economy. In 2015–16 the World Bank placed it at the top of the table for global growth and forecast a slightly higher figure for the future. Services are growing especially strongly: for instance, in the IT and software sectors. After independence, India was overtaken by China. In 1960, India’s per capita wealth was higher than China’s; today it is between a half and two thirds of China’s. Yet, if it continues, Indian growth will make it the third-largest economy in the world by the 2020s.

  India has been very successful at creating world-class global brands with a far higher standard of corporate governance than exists in China. Firms like Reliance, Ranbaxy, Infosys and Tata (the largest manufacturing employer in the UK) have risen to the top of their industries; overall, IT outsourcing, pharmaceuticals and the automotive industry have performed exceptionally well. India now invests more in the UK than the UK invests in India. But India is hampered by a number of problems. While their scale varies considerably from state to state, infrastructure everywhere requires huge investment to bring it up to the standards – for example, in transport and the power sectors – required in a modern economy. Corruption and clientelism are rampant in politics and the political class is dominated by family connections. The legal system is slow and also weakened by corruption. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party, led by the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, may be rather more business-friendly than its main opponents in the Congress Party, but it teeters on the edge of promoting extreme Hindu nationalism. For its part, Congress – the original party of Indian independence – seems trapped with a dynastic leadership in an out-of-date socialist cul-de-sac. Other regional parties thrive in this political atmosphere. Meanwhile a Maoist guerrilla campaign – the Naxalites – continues to affect about nine states. Yet India’s very effective technology sector, its extremely successful diaspora, its growing middle class, its cultural successes in literature and cinema, and its booming media sector promise an exciting future. There are huge challenges. Should the economy be mishandled or regional and sectarian problems ignite, a demographic boom could easily turn into a demographic bomb with huge numbers of poor men and women without jobs.

  A real difference between India and China is that Indians are usually very open about the problems that affect their country. Not so mainland China. Most Chinese follow the former and much criticized Hua Guofeng (Mao’s unsuccessful chosen successor) in being ‘whatever-ists’ – whatever the party says is happening is happening. Overall, of course, the story has been a pretty amazing one. Alongside the fall of global communism – as distinct from Chinese Leninism – this has been the most important development of my political lifetime, and the Chinese economy has doubled in size every eight years for three decades since I first clapped eyes on the country in 1979. China now produces more in two weeks than it did in the whole of a year in the 1970s. It is the world’s largest exporter and manufacturer, the biggest maker of steel. Its demand for energy has gone up by well over 200 per cent since 2000. Everywhere you look there is Chinese money, from the purchase of famous Château wine estates in Bordeaux, to investment in crucial Western infrastructure, to buying up vast tracts of African and other continents to get access to mineral and agriculture supplies. So is the red east – to borrow from the old Maoist song – about to ensure that the Communist Party’s sun will shine on the rest of us?

  It is not in our interest that China’s success should turn into a story of failure, but in my view it is profoundly unlikely that (to borrow from the title of a book by a British ex-Marxist)
China is about to rule the world. First, there are the perils of exponentialism to which I have already referred. The line never, ever, just continues up the whiteboard and through the ceiling. As the American economist Herb Stein used to say, things that can’t go on for ever, don’t. Larry Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary, while noting the humbling of past predictions of continuing helter-skelter growth in the USSR and Japan, argues that China’s growth will flag as has happened previously with rapidly growing economies. These reversals are sometimes pretty dramatic. There has been a median decline of 4.7 per cent in the rate of growth of the twenty-eight countries that had previously sustained more than eight years of super-rapid growth. If China followed this pattern its growth would snap back from its present faltering 6.5–7 per cent figures to much less than 4 per cent.

  China may yet defeat all the odds, and anyway what is really happening in China is difficult to fathom given that even the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, has told us that he does not believe the figures; they are not just ‘man-made’ but ‘Chinese communist official-made’. When a Chinese leader departs from ‘whatever-itis’ and tells us that China faces a four-part challenge then we should perhaps take some notice. Li’s predecessor, Wen Jiabao, expressed his own doubts about China’s prospects when he set out the four ‘uns’ confronting the country after the National People’s Congress as far back as 2007. The Chinese economic model was, he said, unsustainable partly because of environmental costs. It was uncoordinated, with an imbalance between investment and consumption, manufacturing and services. It was unbalanced across the country between the sea-based provinces and the interior. Finally, it was unstable because of growing inequity. Not much has changed to manage an escape from this four-cornered trap.