Maps
List of Illustrations
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publisher will be pleased to amend in future printings any errors or omissions brought to their attention. Numbers refer to plates.
4. Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten (L) and Director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs office Lu Ping entering a meeting room for talks in Beijing, 21 October 1992. (Photograph: Mike Fiala / AFP / Getty Images).
5. Lee Kuan Yew and Chris Patten at the inaugural Li Ka Shing Distinguished Lecture at the University of Hong Kong, December 1992. SPH-ID: 18512000. (Photograph: Lianhe Zaobao).
13. Peter Ricketts and Michael Sze, 1993. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Lord Ricketts GCMG GCVO.
14. Chris Patten and Zhou Nan at China National Day Banquet, 29 September 1993. (Photograph: Martin Chan / South China Morning Post / Getty Images).
23. Fanling Lodge was built as a summer home for colonial governors in 1934 and is now used by the chief executive. (Photograph: South China Morning Post).
27. Governor Chris Patten and Tung Chee-hwa appear for the press after their meeting at Government House, 23 December 1996. (Photograph: Robert Ng / South China Morning Post / Getty Images).
31. Aerial view of Chek Lap Kok, 1996 (Photograph: © Michael Yamashita).
32. Chinese President Mr Jiang Zemin (left) shaking hands with British Foreign Secretary Mr Malcolm Rifkind after their meeting in Beijing about the handover of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997. (Photograph:Taken on 8 Jan 1996, by South China Morning Post Staff Photographer).
All other photographs are from the collection of the author and the Patten family.
Foreword
As one of Britain’s and America’s leading historians, Simon Schama, contends, ‘History is an argument.’ The pity is that it is an argument that too often reflects attitudes and even prejudices already held rather than a balanced scrutiny of evidence and narrative. This is even more so when our interpretation of the past has critical significance for the present. The story of Hong Kong, where I spent five years as the last British Governor, has some bearing on a contemporary argument about Empire which carries the battle scars of preconceptions and facile generalizations. No one today (as I said in my farewell speech in Hong Kong on 30 June 1997) would seek to justify imperialism – though even as I write these words, I think of the narrative that communist China weaves around its repressive rule in Xinjiang and Tibet. More relevant now is not whether we can justify colonial rule, applying contemporary values to past millennia, or even enumerate some of its benign consequences, but how and why empires have been assembled. Britain’s Empire is widely believed to have ended formally with our handover of the Hong Kong colony (or ‘territory’ as we liked to call it, covering our embarrassment at the use of the other word) to China, a quarter of a century ago. What created it?
The 19th-century liberal historian and defender of imperialism Sir John Seeley famously remarked that ‘the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind’, mostly a result of mistakes, accidents and unintended consequences and the reactions to them. This was the opinion too of Jan Morris, who not only wrote a masterly history of Empire but also the best descriptive book on Hong Kong. Looking at the history of this colony, it certainly bears out her argument that imperial history was ‘all bits and pieces’. But the ‘bits and pieces’ on the southern China shore, just south of the Tropic of Cancer and close to the Pearl River Delta, were very different to those that were assembled into Empire elsewhere.
The archipelago south of the Kowloon Hills – peninsula, islands, rocks and ‘fragrant Harbour’ – was the territorial booty of a war fought with the declining Qing Empire to allow the British trading houses (forerunners of the famous hongs) based in Macau and Guangzhou to sell the opium produced in India into China at will. The expenses of the Raj were to be partly allayed by drugs sold and consumed in China, a great civilization no longer able to halt this pernicious example of globalization by requiring the Western barbarians to ‘tremble and obey’. Gunboat diplomacy in the early 1840s ended with China’s defeat and the grant of spoils in the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842. Britain’s man on the spot, Captain Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of trade in China, extracted as a prize for this naval bullying what seemed to many, including Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, the inadequate pickings of a harbour, some islands and a lot of rocks. Disappointment at the modest scale of the plunder perhaps contributed to Captain Elliot’s subsequent appointment as chargé d’affaires in the newly created Republic of Texas, later capped by his governorship of St Helena.
Victory in a second opium war led to a further grant of land, the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula across the harbour from Victoria Island, which was to become the heart of the territory. But the real settlement of Hong Kong’s destiny was still to come. At the tail end of the century, joining with other imperial powers – Japan, Germany, Russia, Portugal, France – in seizing desirable chunks of China from the increasingly enfeebled Qing dynasty, Britain took, not with sovereignty but on a long lease, the hinterland to the north of the harbour and islands. Beyond Kowloon, the so-called New Territories were acquired on a lease for 99 years. In 1898, when the lease was agreed, who would have imagined the day when it would terminate? But the days, months, years went by; the pages of the calendar turned and yellowed. Hong Kong’s history was lived in the growing shadow of its finite destiny: never to stand on its own feet but to return on 30 June 1997 to the embrace of the motherland.
The government of this motherland twisted and turned from rule by a Qing Emperor to attempts at democracy, from warlords to civil war, from Japanese invaders to war between nationalist Kuomintang and communist revolutionaries, and finally to Leninist totalitarianism which at one time seemed to thaw before it froze again. This is the implacable reality that always confronted Hong Kong, changed though it was from rocks and harbour to a great international commercial hub. It was never to become an independent city state but must always remain a city in China trying to make its peace with whatever and whoever held sway in Beijing and beyond.
As the clock ticked on, some were to argue that Britain could legally hold on to the land which it had been granted and simply give back what was held on a lease. But, as Hong Kong grew, this was never actually an option. The burgeoning city needed the water, the land, the space and the agriculture of the New Territories, where in time seven new cities were built. Moreover, the price that Britain would pay in terms of international opprobrium would have been too high: it would have been an apparent reprise of those ‘unequal treaties’ of the 19th century. China could always squeeze the city at will or take it by force if it was so minded, and the only bunkers in Hong Kong were on the golf courses. Yet so long as Hong Kong thrived, so long as it was a valuable conduit for money, goods and expertise from the outside world into China and in the other direction, it was permitted to continue. This was true during the Korean War, in the grim days of Maoist economics and on to the days that saw the steady reconnection of China to the world under Deng Xiaoping and later.
Hong Kong’s development, especially after the Second World War, saw the growth of an educated Chinese middle class, the usually successful competition from Chinese entrepreneurs for the old British masters of the China trade, and a growing and healthy population with its own increasingly explicit notion of citizenship. Without the ticking clock, all this would have pointed in one direction. Like virtually every other British colony, as the imperial appetite and capacity faded, Hong Kong would be prepared with all the hardware and software of British political and constitutional practice for independence: the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a politically neutral civil service and a democratically elected government. In preparation for independent self-determination, politicians would be elected by the citizens of the new country which had taken control of itself and would be charged with the accountable responsibility of running it. The fact that this was never to be Hong Kong’s destiny gave the communist regime in Beijing a powerful argument, one actually accepted with some relief by Britain and by those in the colony who feared the establishment in Hong Kong of even the first stages of democratization. Begin to give Hong Kong the democratic institutions put in place in other colonies, Beijing’s communist rulers said, and Hong Kong would start to think that sooner or later it was to become like Singapore or Malaysia, an independent state. That was something Beijing could never contemplate.
Such Chinese constraint was perhaps not, as I say, unwelcome to the British government or to the British business community in Hong Kong. A Governor who flirted with ideas of democracy, shortly after the Second World War, was given short shrift. The reasons for this attitude weakened as the years passed. In the 1940s and ’50s there were worries that the battle between the Kuomintang and the communists might simply be played out in Hong Kong’s own political arena. Then there were the anxieties about the violent politics of Chinese communists during and after the Cultural Revolution transferring to the colony. There were always patronizing assumptions that people in Hong Kong were not interested in politics but only in making money. These were undoubtedly infused with the anxiety that democratic politics would inevitably lead to more welfare spending, more government interference and regulation, and even (perish the thought) higher taxes than Hong Kong’s rock bottom imposts. Would it be remotely possible to run one of the freest and most open economies in the world if elected politicians could interfere with the free flow of market forces? Yet as education did its benign work; as men and women joined professions and studied at universities the works of Karl Popper and other advocates of open societies; as the community read in its newspapers and saw on its televisions what was happening in South Korea and Taiwan and all around the world; and as the people of Hong Kong were encouraged to take their own economic decisions; as all this happened, it became difficult to argue that they should be denied any say in the biggest issues affecting their lives. Then they had the disagreeable and very worrying experience, while listening to the ticking clock, of wondering what the corpses in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989 told them about their imminent future. Their demands were surprising for their moderation; their behaviour astonishing for its restraint. What was to happen to them?
It had seemed in the mid-1980s that a foundation had not only been discovered for their future well-being, but a formula too which could provide assurance and satisfaction all round. When Britain began to negotiate with Beijing about Hong Kong’s future after 1997, Deng Xiaoping made a proposal already offered to Taiwan to encourage its reunification with mainland China. The mantra which encompassed it was ‘one country, two systems’. At the end of the lease, Hong Kong would become once again a part of China under Chinese sovereignty. Yet it would be allowed to retain a high degree of autonomy, in all areas except foreign policy and defence, and would be allowed to preserve its existing way of life and the manner in which it ran its affairs: capitalism, private ownership, the rule of law, the freedoms associated with an open society (the press, assembly, religion, enquiry), a politically neutral civil service, and the accountability of government to the legislature. And so it came to pass: all this was set out very clearly in an international treaty between China and Britain. The Sino-British Joint Declaration was lodged at the United Nations in 1985 and its principal promises were turned into a constitution for Hong Kong: 160 articles and three annexes were drafted by China with the input of some Hong Kong citizens, which was called the Basic Law.
The genius of this formula was that it accommodated the political and moral embarrassment of both the British and Chinese sides and it did so, moreover, in a fashion that appeared to satisfy the citizens of Hong Kong, who, unlike those in other colonies, were not actually going to be given their independence. The embarrassment for Britain was moral because of precisely this point, and political because we could not help being reminded of the circumstances in which Hong Kong – albeit now a flourishing international city – had been acquired. The political embarrassment was for China partly this reminder of the years of the so-called (not unreasonably) ‘unequal treaties’, but also the knowledge (which must have given pause for thought to all but the most ignorant and ideologically hidebound communists) that the large majority of Hong Kong citizens were themselves refugees from the brutalities of modern communist history.
Alongside the ticking clock, the fact that Hong Kong is a refugee community is the second most significant of its defining characteristics. The population of Hong Kong, which was 5.8 million when I arrived in 1992, has been drawn from all around the world – from Iraq, South Asia, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Britain and other European countries. You can check this global personality by ticking off any list of international schools in the city. However, apart from the descendants of a tiny indigenous number of people, the population is above all drawn from elsewhere in China. First-, second- and third-generation refugees were the relatives of those who fought for the Kuomintang and of the business leaders who fled from Shanghai after the communist takeover in 1949, bringing industries such as garments and watchmaking to this British colony. They were from families who swam, stowed away on ships and clambered over razor wire to get away from the persecution of landowners, from the Great Leap Forward, from the starvation (even cannibalism) of the great famine and its tombstone politics, from the ubiquitous horrors and brutalities of modern Chinese crackdowns on any dissent. The flow of immigrants to this redoubt of British imperialist oppression in the 1970s was so great that the authorities introduced a ‘touch base’ policy. If you could get across the border, reach an urban area and find a relative there, you could have a Hong Kong identity card. These were the people who had been told that if they were to love China they must also make clear that they loved the Communist Party; the lethal consubstantiality of Chinese Leninist theology.
So here was a city of refugees with an end date to its certainties, with promises about its future, but no say in what that future should be, and with a usually well-meaning government – albeit one whose colonial masters in London often gave the impression that they thought it was a distraction from the greater game of Sino-British trade and global partnership in solving the more important problems of the day. A pebble in the shoe. But there is one other inescapable reality about this extraordinary place, this imperial oddball. In a real sense it was made by China – by the totalitarianism that drove so many of its business class from Shanghai, which drove wave after wave of refugees to its Archipelago and Islands, to its slums, temporary housing areas and before too long its high-rise blocks of flats, and to its sampans and dragon boat races, and its common law courts and its liberties, and a police force that used to be called ‘Asia’s finest’. That was then. These are the people who having fled communist China then helped in the extraordinary opening up of China to the world’s marketplace, to assist in China’s real and so far sustained great leap forward. And their reward? That same communist China is now set on demolishing their way of life and their freedom, stone by stone and broken promise by broken promise.
The outrage and the arguments around the world that this has provoked encouraged me to publish this diary, which I kept while I was Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997; perhaps this account of my experiences is now worth putting on the public record. I have added at the end of this foreword a short note listing the main institutions and arrangements that provided the infrastructure of official life in Hong Kong. At the end of the diary I have added a brief cast list of those principally involved in running Hong Kong and policy concerning the handover of Hong Kong in both London and Beijing, and finally a short essay giving a brief account of recent events in what has turned out to be the demolition of a free society.
I have not used any material from government archives, neither those kept at Kew nor those which reside separately with other colonial papers. Nor have I used any private correspondence. I have from time to time borrowed the description of events from the meticulously kept diary of my wife, Lavender, and occasionally have cross-checked dates and events with her accounts. We both intend to give our original diaries – in my own case principally the transcription of tape recordings and the large exercise books in which I wrote down every evening what was happening during the last part of my governorship – to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and ask that they should be made available, warts and all, to scholars who wish to read them. In some places the text has been reformulated for publication and to cope with the reduction of the total day-by-day diary by several hundred thousand words. I have not excised passages where occasionally my frustration may, with hindsight, have got the better of me, since they are a true reflection of the tensions that from time to time surfaced as we navigated an unprecedented series of events. But looking back now there is nothing material that I would have done differently. My only self-censorship has been to avoid the use of names from time to time, particularly those of people who are still in Hong Kong and might suffer because of the brutal and authoritarian communist regime which now holds a city I love in its handcuffs.
What was to become the heart of Hong Kong, the harbour and main island (Victoria), was ceded to Britain in the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842, which ended the First Opium War. The southern part of the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island were later ceded to Britain in 1860 in the Convention of Peking at the conclusion of the Second Opium War. The so-called New Territories, covering more than 85 per cent of Hong Kong’s land mass, stretching from Kowloon to the China border on the Sham Chun River and including most of the outlying islands, were leased to Britain for 99 years in the Second Convention of Peking, signed in 1898. This was part of the carve-up of China by colonial powers which followed China’s defeat in the First Sino–Japanese War.
The return to China of the ceded and leased territories of Hong Kong was negotiated in the Sino-British Joint Declaration (JD), signed in 1984 by the Chinese Premier, Zhao Ziyang, and the UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. It was ratified and lodged at the UN in the following year.
The Basic Law (BL) is a Chinese national law adopted by the National People’s Congress in 1990 in order to implement the Joint Declaration. Some Hong Kong citizens gave advice in the drafting of the law, which came into effect on 1 July 1997 as the de facto constitution of Hong Kong.
Until 1997, Hong Kong was run by a Governor, appointed by and responsible to the government and Parliament of the United Kingdom. There were 28 governors of Hong Kong in all. I was the last, from 1992 to 1997. After 1997 the Governor’s role was taken by a Chief Executive.
The Hong Kong government was run by a mixture of expatriate and local Chinese civil servants. By 1997 all these senior civil servants were Hong Kong Chinese except for the Attorney General. The Chief Justice (CJ) was also Hong Kong Chinese. The senior member of the government under the Governor was the Chief Secretary (CS). The Financial Secretary (FS) was in charge of financial and economic affairs. The secretaries of individual government departments acting under the Governor and the Chief Secretary were more like ministers than British permanent secretaries. The garrison was commanded by the Commander British Forces (CBF).
The Governor was advised by an Executive Council (Exco), which he appointed, and was broadly representative of (mostly) establishment opinion in the community. There were usually between a dozen and 16 members of Exco, for example 16 in 1992 became 13 in 1993. By the 1990s the Legislature Council (Legco) included both elected and appointed members. The Basic Law laid down that there should be 60 members on the council, 20 elected from geographical constituencies through direct elections, 10 returned by an election committee, and 30 elected by functional constituencies. The Bill of Rights was enacted by Legco in 1991 to incorporate the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights into Hong Kong law before the handover.
The Governor had his office and home in Government House (GH). He had a private office of civil servants, a spokesman, two personal advisers brought from Britain and an ADC, as well as bodyguards drawn from the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. He also had a Central Policy Unit (CPU). There was a housekeeper who ran Government House, and the Governor’s wife had a social secretary. At weekends there was a house at Fanling, quite close to the border, for the Governor’s use.
As Governor, I discussed most big decisions, especially concerning China and transitional issues involving the change of sovereignty, with a group which was called for prosaic reasons the Ad Hoc Group. This typically would include the Chief Secretary, the Financial Secretary, relevant heads of Hong Kong government departments, my Foreign Office (FCO) political adviser and his deputy, the head of the CPU, my spokesman and the senior team from the Joint Liaison Group (JLG). The JLG was set up under the Joint Declaration to consult on its implementation, to discuss issues related to the smooth transfer of government in 1997, and to exchange information and have consultations on subjects agreed by both sides. The British side was led by an FCO official of ambassadorial rank and there was a similar team on the Chinese side. The JLG was where most of the spade work was done regarding the transition, on the British side by an outstanding team of very hard-working and superhumanly patient officials.
We had regular contact with the British Embassy in Beijing and were supported by the Hong Kong department in London, which worked under the senior diplomats responsible for policy on China and East Asia. They, in turn, worked to a minister of state and the Foreign Secretary himself. The Governor was required to take major decisions with the advice and agreement of the Prime Minister and senior ministers, especially the Foreign Secretary.
On the Chinese side there was an office called the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office (HKMAO), whose responsibilities were as the title describes. The Chinese Foreign Ministry would also intervene directly from time to time with the FCO. Within Hong Kong the primary coordinator of United Front (that is, pro-Chinese communist) activity was the New China News Agency (NCNA), which also acted frequently as a spokesman for the Chinese Communist Party on Hong Kong matters. Its head was a not very diplomatic diplomat. The Hang Seng index was a benchmark for the principal stocks traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange. It was clearly sometimes manipulated by politically well-informed Chinese investors and mainland companies.
Many UN members had Consulates-General or the equivalent in Hong Kong, since it was frequently a larger trade partner for their countries than most sovereign states. A regular feature of the weekly life of the Governor and his wife was attendance at national-day celebrations, where an observant Governor would be able to acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge of national flags. Dogs were not a traditional part of the Governor’s entourage, but Lavender and I introduced them, as readers will see.