Hong Kong’s legacy — from Chris Patten’s Diaries to City on the Edge

One day in the 1990s when Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, visited a psychiatric hospital as part of his civic duties, he was accosted by a patient demanding to know “why your democracy is handing Hong Kong, a fine and free city, over to a communist society without ever having consulted the people who live here about what they want?” Here, muses a rueful Patten in his diary, was “the sanest man in Hong Kong locked up in a hospital for the mentally ill”. 

As Patten found to his cost, the UK’s dilemma over its Hong Kong colony, which it ruled for 150 years and eventually handed back to China in 1997, had worsened after the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989.

But for the 7.5mn people of Hong Kong, Chinese rule turned out to be a much graver existential problem than the diplomatic embarrassment it represented for the British. After the handover and Patten’s departure, and particularly after the rise to power of the ruthless Xi Jinping in 2013, the Communist party became ever more assertive in suppressing Hong Kong’s freedoms and undermining the autonomy supposedly guaranteed for 50 years by treaty with the British.

Two accounts of events in the city, both newly published but with the writing separated by more than two decades, minutely observe how China broke its promises — first insidiously and gradually and then openly and suddenly — and the impact on the lives of Hong Kongers.

Patten’s diaries of his frustrating yet rewarding stint as governor cover the years from 1992 to the 1997 handover. Ho-fung Hung’s City on the Edge, an academic study of Hong Kong under Chinese rule since then, reaches as far back as the 12th century but focuses on the pro-democracy protests in the run-up to the 2020 national security law that finally extinguished the city’s autonomy.

Patten, who was Conservative party chair and had just lost his Bath seat as an MP in the 1992 election when he was given the consolation prize of Hong Kong by prime minister John Major, is a genial and self-deprecating companion through the years leading up to the handover, a period he wrote about in his memoir East and West.

Famously branded by China as “a sinner for a thousand years, a prostitute and a triple violator [of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration]”, he gives as good as he gets, describing the Chinese leaders at the transfer ceremony on his last day in Hong Kong as “the coelacanths of Leninism, rich, mighty, a bit seedy, cruel, corrupt, depressingly unimpressive”. In his preface he writes that subsequent events proved “a story of broken promises and totalitarian vandalism”. 

But he reserves particular venom for the British and Hong Kong business leaders — “creeps” and “toadies” — and the UK diplomats who constantly undermined his attempts to stand up to Beijing and secure a better post-1997 deal for Hong Kong. The villains are men such as David Young of Cable & Wireless (a company “kowtowing” its way “incompetently to disaster”), William Purves of HSBC and, of course, the “clever, conceited, acerbic” Percy Cradock, former UK ambassador to China.

The heroes and heroines include the formidably competent Anson Chan, whom Patten chose to run his administration, irreverent entrepreneur and newspaper founder Jimmy Lai (now jailed), and businessman and adventurer Simon Murray, as well as the often underestimated John Major and his foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind. Like Patten, they all tried to champion or at least understand the interests of Hong Kongers.

French prime minister Édouard Balladur’s face ‘gutters down into his suit like a melting candle’

On the way, the reader is treated to pen-portraits of everyone from a domineering but refreshingly libertarian Margaret Thatcher to the “mildly sinister, longtime communist trustie” CY Leung, who went on to serve as Hong Kong’s chief executive. French prime minister Édouard Balladur’s face “gutters down into his suit like a melting candle”. 

In the course of his diaries, Patten argues convincingly that for Britain or any other country to abandon liberal principles and yield to the Chinese Communist party’s demands at every opportunity brings neither political nor commercial benefits. The trade and investment statistics he cites from the final decades of British rule do indeed suggest there is little correlation between grovelling and real rewards for business.

But the question remains as to whether any negotiator, however skilled, could have averted China’s decision to undermine and eventually destroy the autonomy and freedoms outlined in the treaty and in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. One does not need a law degree to understand that jailing democratic politicians and forcing newspapers to close are flagrant breaches of the Basic Law’s guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association.

There is a revealing moment less than a year before the handover when Qian Qichen, the foreign minister who is judged by Patten to be one of the more reasonable interlocutors on the Chinese side, asserts in a press interview that there will be no more vigils in Hong Kong to commemorate Tiananmen and no more criticism of Chinese leaders once Beijing takes over. As US diplomat Morton Abramowitz had prophetically told Patten the previous year, “hardly anyone believes this nonsense” about China sticking to the Basic Law.

In City on the Edge, Hung, professor in political economy at Johns Hopkins University, provides a deeply researched and colourful history of Hong Kong’s political movements, including the early Communist party ties with the democratic movement that were severed by Hong Kong democrats’ protests after Tiananmen.

Hung also explains how Beijing’s repeated attempts to crush dissent since the handover ended up fuelling resentment and promoting the very independence movement it feared. “Beijing always saw Hong Kong in light of the historical precedents of absorbing other pre-existing states in its frontier regions, like Tibet,” he writes. But it was still surprised by the overwhelming support among Hong Kong’s people for the anti-Beijing demonstrators, even after protests turned violent in 2019.

By different routes, the two authors reach similar conclusions: the Communist party’s brutal crackdown in Hong Kong is likely to undermine what little faith remains abroad in China’s promises.

“China’s decision [in 2020] to impose the national security law as a pre-emptive strike against a perceived revolutionary situation in Hong Kong amounts to the premature end of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ [the formula for autonomy] 27 years before the 2047 deadline,” Hung writes. “The cost of this move for China could be grave,” he concludes, at a time when the US is already seeking to curb Beijing’s technological and strategic ambitions and China still benefits from Hong Kong’s role as an internationally connected financial centre.

Patten is equally blunt. “No one can now pretend that they don’t understand the reality of Chinese communism,” he writes in an afterword to the diaries, “and no one can surely base their approach to China on the Cradock proposition that, while the Chinese leadership may be thugs, they are men of their word.” 

The Hong Kong Diaries by Chris Patten Allen Lane, £30, 560 pages

City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule by Ho-fung Hung Cambridge University Press, £20, 316 pages

Victor Mallet is FT Paris bureau chief and former Asia editor

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