Opinion | Chris Patten's folly: Doomed legacy foretold in Westminster

By Grenville Cross

The United Kingdom's Parliament in Westminster is among the world's oldest legislatures. Although the political parties have always insisted their members of Parliament toe the party line, there is a long tradition of independent thinking. Whereas politicians who challenged the prevailing orthodoxies sometimes faced repercussions, history has been their judge.

When, for example, William Wilberforce sought the abolition of the slave trade in 1789, he was condemned for threatening prosperity and favoring France. After Winston Churchill denounced the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he was branded a warmonger. Both men are now national heroes.

There were also politicians who were ostracized for advocating a moral foreign policy toward China, but they also have been vindicated.

After the UK launched the First Opium War against China (1839-42), it was denounced by the Conservative member of Parliament for Newark, William Ewart Gladstone (a future Liberal prime minister). When he condemned "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace", he was accused of being unpatriotic. When he called the opium trade "most infamous and atrocious," the vested interests were incensed, fearful for their profits.

However, as everybody now knows, Gladstone was on the right side of history.

On Nov 14, 1996, another principled stand over China involved a veteran Labour Party politician, Andrew Faulds.

With barely 30 weeks left before the handover, Parliament held its last major debate on Hong Kong ("the debate"). It lasted for five hours, and much of its focus was on the electoral reforms of the then-governor, Chris Patten. The Conservative government, led by Patten's ally John Major, stoutly supported his reforms, and most members of Parliament, wanting to present a common front, fell into line.

In opening the debate, the foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, said Patten, his former colleague, was "a governor of whom we can be properly proud". He even paid tribute to "the vision with which Chris Patten has steered Hong Kong through these difficult days", which was wishful thinking.

Fast-forward 28 years, and both Rifkind and Patten are now patrons of Hong Kong Watch, the UK-based anti-China propaganda outfit operated by the serial fantasist Benedict Rogers. This is revelatory and provides a fascinating insight into their mindsets in the 1990s when they were responsible for Hong Kong.

In 1992, after arriving in Hong Kong, Patten drove a coach and horses through its previously agreed constitutional settlement. He claimed to know better than anybody else what was good for the city, and abused those who pointed out the error of his ways or advised caution ("creeps" and "toadies"). An unabashed careerist, he portrayed himself as a man of principle who was not afraid of confronting China. He imagined this would play well in political circles back home (as indeed it did, with some Conservatives talking about him as their future leader).

Patten's ambitions, however, collided with Hong Kong's long-term interests and endangered its future stability. Far from benefiting its democratic development, he paved the way for an appointed provisional legislature on July 1, 1997, as history confirms.

Between January and February 1990, there were secret exchanges ("the seven letters") over Hong Kong's future electoral arrangements between the then-British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, and his Chinese counterpart, Qian Qichen. Hurd told Qian of his hope that, "by agreement with you", faster progress toward democracy might be made in the Legislative Council elections of 1995, and Qian was not unreceptive. Between them, they established the basis of future elections, including the ambit of functional constituencies. Although the number of directly elected legislators in 1995 would not be increased, Qian undertook that the number would be enlarged to 50 percent by 2003.

These arrangements, unfortunately, were then superseded by Patten's own electoral package, outlined in his policy address of Oct 7, 1992. It included new arrangements for filling seats in the election committee and the functional constituencies in the Legislative Council elections in 1995. It also involved a widening of the franchise, with 10 councilors being elected by an 800-member election committee, which would be chosen by popular ballot.

As Beijing naturally assumed the issue had already been settled in the agreements with Hurd, it accused Patten (and Britain) of acting in bad faith.

During the debate, Rifkind's deputy, Jeremy Hanley, was asked if Patten, when he acted unilaterally, was aware of the Hurd-Qian agreements. He replied that Patten "saw and was aware of the details of the exchanges before his visit to Peking in October 1992, and before the start of negotiations with China on the electoral arrangements". (The implication being he had chosen to disregard them.) It would have been astonishing if Patten had not been fully briefed, although he claimed otherwise.

In The Hong Kong Diaries, Patten denied knowing previously about the Hurd-Qian exchanges. On Oct 19, 1992, he wrote it was "extraordinary that no one mentioned the telegrams to me; nor were they ever included in my voluminous briefing". However implausible, his explanation was that Hurd had "presumably forgotten all about the exchange," and that "evidently Qian Qichen had as well". Although history will be the judge, and he downplayed the impact of the seven letters once he knew of them, it beggared belief that the British government would have left him in the dark on such a sensitive issue.

Be that as it may, Patten immediately set about upsetting the apple cart, which appalled people in both countries. Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was Margaret Thatcher's foreign secretary when the Sino-British Joint Declaration (JD) was signed in 1984, said the Chinese had a right to feel aggrieved by Patten's antics. He explained, "Hong Kong prospers when Beijing and London are in harmony," something Patten never understood.

Without Beijing's blessing, Patten's electoral model was a castle built on sand. As he should have realized, it could not possibly endure. If he had imagined Beijing would simply acquiesce once his changes were enacted, it was a tragic miscalculation. By acting unilaterally, Patten made the creation of the Provisional Legislative Council (PLC) inevitable, something his parliamentary supporters could not grasp.

Thus, during the debate, Rifkind denounced China's impending establishment of the PLC, and almost everybody present agreed. The Labour Party's foreign affairs spokesman, Robin Cook, said, "China should be left in no doubt that (Rifkind's) denunciation is fully endorsed by all parties in this Chamber." An incestuous consensus emerged that Patten was right and Beijing was wrong, although one courageous individual, Andrew Faulds, called out Patten's folly.

The Labour member of Parliament for Warley East, Faulds, a former actor, was a larger-than-life character who was always his own man. He described his most prized asset as "a valuable voice", and he never shied away from calling a spade a spade. A co-founder of the Great Britain China Parliamentary group (1968), he condemned Patten for imperiling Hong Kong's future and harming Anglo-Chinese relations.

Faulds described Patten's obsessive pursuit of constitutional upheaval as "arrogant and ill-informed". By reneging on the seven letters, he had "aborted the through-train agreement", and this, in turn, ensured "there would be no completion of his new project".

By abandoning "a cut-and-dried series of agreements", Patten, said Faulds, had "clearly violated the agreements between the two countries", and it was "disingenuous" of Rifkind to claim otherwise.

In reality, there was never any question of Beijing playing ball with Patten. The idea, said Faulds, "that China would accept the deal was arrogance beyond belief on the part of the Governor and his ill-informed advisers". Although Faulds had read the situation perfectly, Patten's supporters recoiled in horror at his plain speaking, but he was only getting warmed up.

When Faulds described Patten as "a man who seems to know little of either Hong Kong or China and a man who, deplorably, was not prepared to listen to those who did know", he was spot on. He praised Sir Percy Cradock, the Sinologist who advised Margaret Thatcher upon the JD, for having condemned Patten's grandstanding, which had damaged the "real interests" of Hong Kong. He said Cradock's analysis of Patten had succeeded in "puncturing his pretensions and showing him up as an ambitious, scheming politician", a truth that rankles with Patten to this day.

When Faulds referred to Patten having been given the Hong Kong governorship by Major as "recompense" for having been voted out of Parliament by the Bath electors in the 1992 general election, he called him a "failed Bath politician" who had "failed us". When, moreover, he compared Patten to Sir Murray MacLehose, the governor of Hong Kong from 1971 to 1982, who moved mountains for Hong Kong and developed its relationship with Beijing, he said MacLehose must be "put at the apex of achievement while Mr Patten would be playing in the puddles".

Although his assessment of Patten infuriated his audience, Faulds' concluding observations were prescient. He said the JD's vision for the continuing success of Hong Kong's way of life for 50 years after 1997 would be fulfilled. This was because, as he knew from his own studies, "China is historically a country that keeps its agreements".

Although the government controlled the House of Commons, it was unsure how to respond to Faulds' analyses. Jeremy Hanley belittled his views, calling him "the only dissenting voice". He then sought to smear him, accusing him of "uncritical support for the Chinese", which was less than fair. Although, unlike Hanley, he had followed China's affairs closely for many years, and was on good terms with Zhou Nan, the former vice-foreign minister involved in the handover negotiations in the 1980s, his assessments of the situation were always realistic and evidence based.

Although Faulds was in the minority, he was, like Gladstone, not afraid of speaking truth to power. And, like Gladstone, he has been vindicated by history. He was right about the failure of Patten's electoral reforms, right about the aborting of the "through train", right about the importance of honest dealing with China, and right about Beijing's commitment to the success of the "one country, two systems" policy.

Although Faulds could not have foreseen that President Xi Jinping, in 2022, would have announced that the "one country, two systems" policy would endure after 2047, he would greatly have welcomed it, given his feelings for Hong Kong (he died in 2000).

Although Patten and Rifkind are still alive and kicking, neither applauded Xi's announcement, which was no surprise. If they could not manage Hong Kong's destiny properly when their hands were on the levers of power, nothing could be expected of them after they became Hong Kong Watch propagandists. But at least everybody can now see them in their true colors.

Since 1997, Patten has never tired of throwing brickbats at Hong Kong. He relishes tarnishing its reputation, spreading myths about its situation, and giving succor to those threatening its "one country, two systems" policy. It is pitiful that a politician who could have helped Hong Kong so much is now entirely marginalized, ranting away to any Sinophobe willing to give him the time of day.

In the late Andrew Faulds, however, Hong Kong had a true friend. Once a lone voice, his message was authentic, as time has proved. He should never be forgotten.

 

The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The article was first published in China Daily.