Hong Kong’s last British governor, Chris Patten, reveals in new diaries how he battled London and Beijing over handover

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In 1999, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, was in New York representing the European Commission. At the United Nations, he met with China’s foreign affairs minister, Tang Jiaxuan, who told him: “This time, Governor Patten, we must co-operate.”

Mr. Patten replied, “But that is what I wanted to do last time.”

Later this month, Mr. Patten will publish his private diaries from his time running Hong Kong – 1992 to 1997. Early on, he notes, “I don’t want to be seen as Beijing’s man in Hong Kong, nor as somebody whose principal concern is British commercial interests.

“I have to be seen as somebody who is prepared to stand up for Hong Kong both with Beijing and with London.”

Doing so would prove his greatest challenge.

From the outset, Beijing viewed Mr. Patten with a suspicion that would quickly turn to loathing, as he attempted to follow through on promises of greater democratization and the protection of Hong Kong’s freedoms prior to its 1997 handover to China. Meanwhile, many in Britain, particularly the unelected bureaucrats in the Foreign Office, saw Mr. Patten at best as a hindrance to better relations with China and, at worst, a saboteur of their careful work wrapping up 150 years of British rule.

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No one better characterized the latter camp than Percy Cradock, a former British ambassador to China who was intimately involved in the drafting of the 1984 Joint Declaration setting the conditions for the handover of Hong Kong. During those negotiations, the people of Hong Kong – including their elected representatives – were kept almost completely in the dark and were never able to vote on their future.

“They pretty well take it for granted that ultimately you have to go along with Beijing rather than risk arguments,” Mr. Patten wrote in 1992 of officials such as Mr. Cradock. “Beijing rules U.K.”

Meeting Mr. Cradock around this time, Mr. Patten said the old sinologist did “everything except roll his eyes” at his opinions on China.

“It may be a bit unfair, but I’m not sure that the interests of people who live in Hong Kong are of very much concern to him, though he plainly thinks that they will be best off if nobody disagrees with him when it comes to planning their future,” Mr. Patten writes in his diaries. “He gets particularly cross when I refer to debates about the Joint Declaration in the House of Commons when our commitments to democracy were referred to again and again by MPs and even (less robust) by ministers. He doesn’t quite say, ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about,’ but this is what he implies.”

Other prominent establishment figures in Britain were equally appalled at the idea of doing anything that might offend the Chinese, including former chancellor of the exchequer Geoffrey Howe and former Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan, who told Mr. Patten, “That I mustn’t think that I have to martyr myself for the future of Hong Kong and the British interest is to make sure that our businessmen can do a lot of trade with China.”

The Chinese, meanwhile, though committed to gaining sovereignty over Hong Kong, had little interest in the views of the local population.

Mr. Patten writes in early 1993 that during negotiations in Beijing, China was “determined to keep out anyone from Hong Kong, or at least any Hong Kong officials that are simply advisers in the delegation to us, the sovereign power.”

Three years later, a group of pro-democracy politicians attempted to visit Beijing and lobby Chinese officials. They were not permitted to leave the plane. “Thus does China trust those who will be its citizens after 1997,” Mr. Patten writes. “What will happen to dissenters then?”

Despite opposition from both London and Beijing, Mr. Patten was successful in expanding democracy in Hong Kong.

His reforms resulted in the first fully elected Legislative Council in Hong Kong’s history, with pro-democracy candidates winning a convincing majority in 1995. After the handover, Beijing dissolved the body and replaced it with a wholly appointed one, while reverting election laws to their pre-Patten state.

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Beijing had been assured by its own representatives in Hong Kong that the colony’s population did not really want democracy, so it ignored any evidence to the contrary (and would largely continue to do so post-handover).

During his final year, Mr. Patten’s team found that British officials played a hand in this as well, discovering a series of telegrams discussing public consultations on democracy under the previous administration.

“The principal objective at the time was not to find out what people in Hong Kong wanted but what Beijing might secretly accept,” Mr. Patten writes, adding that London appeared to have advised Chinese officials to encourage opponents of greater democracy to write letters to the government expressing their views, with each one given the same weight as “one petition with scores or hundreds of signatures favouring directly elected seats.”

Mr. Patten notes ruefully, “I think that if we had done more then, we would have had almost a decade of developing representative government under our belts before the handover.

“I suppose that as ever it was all done to avoid a row with China.”

Watching the handover ceremony a year later and looking at the “clapped-out old tyrants” on the Chinese side, Mr. Patten asks himself: “Why do we allow ourselves to be bullied by these people? Most of them are not remotely impressive and are scared stiff of the world. All they can do is bully.”

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In recounting the 25 years since that day in a postscript, Mr. Patten covers the gradual, then sudden, diminution of Hong Kong’s civil freedoms. Under the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020 and electoral reforms passed in its wake, the legislature he once enabled to be directly elected is now open only to pre-approved “patriotic candidates.”

“How much of the rule of law still exists is moot; most of whatever confidence remains seems to be based on the fact that judges still wear wigs,” he notes. “What we have witnessed, and are still witnessing, is the destruction of one of the freest societies in Asia by communist tyranny with the complicity of some local leaders and against the manifest wishes of the majority of the public.”

Much of this is in breach of the Joint Declaration, but all Britain has been able to do is watch and issue the occasional diplomatic condemnation. Mr. Patten is critical of the government’s failure in the 1980s to insert some kind of arbitration mechanism in the agreement, though London’s attitudes toward China in the years since make one wonder if such a mechanism would ever have been used.

He closes the book by asking: “Is Hong Kong and what it has always stood for now doomed?”

“I refuse to accept this, refuse to accept that the sort of world I have taken for granted is doomed to disappear long before my grandchildren are my age,” he writes. Hong Kong’s “fight for freedom, for individual liberty and decency, is our fight as well.”

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The Globe in Hong Kong: More from James Griffiths

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As Hong Kong clamps down, ‘burden of remembering’ Tiananmen shifts overseas

How John Lee transitioned from Hong Kong’s top cop to the city’s next leader

Hong Kong radio host Tam Tak-chi jailed for 40 months under colonial-era sedition law

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