Ghosts of Empire (61 page)

To Mrs Thatcher, the Chinese were as bad as the Russians; they were communists who practised political repression and lived under a dictatorship. They represented to her the antithesis of what she believed Britain stood for. In her mind, Britain upheld freedom and democracy, while the Chinese believed in brutal repression. At a later date, such aggressive liberalism would be dubbed neo-conservatism, and it was radically different from the more conciliatory traditions of the Foreign Office and the British Empire, as these had evolved in the twentieth century. In Hong Kong, the most consistently powerful obstacle to democracy had been the Governor's office itself. Over 150 years, of the twenty-five or so governors who had ruled Hong Kong, only Sir Mark Young had actually initiated a plan for greater democracy, and his plans had been shelved by his successor. Thatcher's view of the British Empire, however, bore very little relation to the reality of empire, which, as I have argued in this book, was a pragmatic affair, governed more by notions of intellectual and social elitism, deference and privilege than by any abstract ideal of democracy or political liberalism.

Thatcher's second visit to Beijing, as prime minister, occurred in September 1982. The date was significant because she had recently defeated Argentina in the Falklands War, which had ended in June of that year. She herself acknowledged the confidence that her recent victory in the South Atlantic had given her on the international stage. She recalled in her memoirs that ‘Britain's standing in the world and my own had been transformed as a result of victory in the Falklands.'
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In the course of the discussions, it appeared that the British Prime Minister rejected the presumption since 1945 that all of Hong Kong really belonged to China and would be given back when the lease on the New Territories expired in 1997. As the
South China Morning Post
reported, citing ‘Chinese sources', Margaret Thatcher was ‘probably the first British statesman in the past decade to dispute China's sovereignty over Hong Kong'.
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In the course of his interview with Mrs Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping reiterated that the ‘Chinese were not prepared to discuss sovereignty'.
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In this statement Deng implied that the sovereignty of Hong Kong was an issue which Mrs Thatcher believed to be a subject of negotiation in the early 1980s. Yet by the late 1970s, there was a considerable degree of agreement between Britain and China on the issue of Hong Kong and China's sovereignty had been fully accepted in the 1950s and 1960s, when Robert Black and Alexander Grantham had ruled out independence for Hong Kong, recognizing that the colony's future lay in China. Margaret Thatcher had read Chemistry at Oxford, and boasted of being the first British prime minister with a science degree; intellectually, too, she had a different background from the British official class, steeped as it was in history and the classics. Regardless of her educational background, she brought very little historical understanding to bear on the issue of Hong Kong; she framed the question of sovereignty simply in terms of a battle between democracy and tyranny, between right and wrong. At her meeting in September, she was surprised that ‘the Chinese refused to budge an inch', and they were surprised that she seemed to be turning her back on an understanding between China and Great Britain which had lasted several decades. All sides were conscious that China could take the colony by force; even in 1949, the British expected the communists to seize Hong Kong, and, before that, in 1945, the Americans had thought that the Chinese
Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek, would accomplish the same end. These experiences formed the background to Deng's rather brutal observation that the Chinese could ‘walk in and take Hong Kong later today if they wanted to'.
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It was a raw statement of realpolitik, but it was merely the unspoken assumption which had existed between the two countries, whose bureaucrats liked to conduct their diplomacy in subtle, covert ways. As Robert Black, the governor at the time, had observed as long ago as 1962, Britain was deluded ‘if we failed to acknowledge that we hold our position in Hong Kong at China's sufferance'.
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This was exactly the point Deng made to Mrs Thatcher, though with considerably less subtlety, twenty years later.

Mrs Thatcher challenged Deng on this point, arguing that if China did invade then the world would see ‘what followed from British to Chinese rule', implying that the true nature of China's totalitarian system would be exposed for the world to see. Deng was taken aback, she later wrote, and ‘his mood became more accommodating'. Yet he was shocked less by her firmness than by her refusal to acknowledge a reality which had been recognized since the end of the Second World War. In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher concludes the section on her trip to China in September 1982 in an uncharacteristically elegiac tone: ‘I had been able to visit the extraordinarily beautiful Summer Palace on the north-western outskirts of Peking, known in Chinese as the Garden of Peaceful Easy Life. I felt that this was a less than accurate description of my own visit to the Far East.'
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The stock market was less sentimental than Mrs Thatcher. The Hang Seng index fell 21 per cent in the week after her visit. It was felt that her intransigence could jeopardize the economic stability of Hong Kong.
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Margaret Thatcher's visit was followed by two years of negotiations between the British Foreign Office and its Chinese counterparts. The conclusion of this diplomacy was the Joint Declaration of 1984, which formed the basis of many disputes between London and Beijing in the years immediately before 1997. The principle underlying the Joint Declaration was that ‘current' institutions of Hong Kong were to remain unchanged for fifty years, but it gave no definition of what the term ‘current' actually signified. The Chinese, perhaps understandably, argued that Hong Kong should return to China as it stood in 1984, when the
Joint Declaration was signed. The British, in both London and Hong Kong, insisted that Hong Kong could not be frozen in time for thirteen years, and that the term ‘current' had to reflect developments which might occur after the Declaration had been signed.
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In the context of Hong Kong's 150-year history as a British colony, the British position seemed disingenuous. The colony had been ruled as a benign autocracy for 150 years. Murray MacLehose, who was still governor as late as 1982, had gently but firmly set himself against widening the democratic process. The fact that Hong Kong had never substantially changed its political or legal institutions was perhaps its most defining characteristic. Even the British constitution itself had changed more since 1841 than had Hong Kong's method of government. In Britain, there had passed the Second Reform Bill in 1867, the Third Reform Bill in 1884, the extension of the franchise to all adult males in 1918, the granting of votes for women at the same age as men in 1928, even a lowering of the voting age to eighteen in 1967. In contrast, apart from the addition or subtraction of a few seats on the Legislative and Executive Councils, absolutely nothing had changed in Hong Kong, which continued to be an outpost of benign authoritarianism while the world around it had been reshaped. And then, just as the final act unfolded, the British tried to rush through reforms, in order to give the impression that the empire had been about democracy all along. It seemed to the Chinese like a desperate sleight of hand.

The first elections in Hong Kong's history took place in 1985, after the Joint Declaration. By any international standards, they were a muted affair, as there was no universal suffrage, but rather a system in which members of district, urban and regional councils and representatives of various professional bodies could participate. There was a member of the Legislative Council who represented the legal profession, another who represented industry, one for medicine and another for architecture.
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This was a corporate view of democracy, more in line with thinking in the Middle Ages; it was a belated start, and more agitation was to come.

In 1989 the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in Beijing, when hundreds of student demonstrators were killed by the repressive Chinese regime. Tiananmen Square helped distort the debate on Hong Kong because it seemed to justify the concept of a Manichaean struggle between
good and evil, between Western democracy and Chinese autocracy, which had formed so large a part of Margaret Thatcher's thinking. Yet, in the context of Hong Kong, the division was a false one. The traditions of British imperial rule were much more akin to Chinese, Confucian concepts of law and order, social hierarchy and deference than to any idea of liberal democracy. Some astute observers had always been aware of the central irony of British rule in Hong Kong, that the British civil servants were even more ‘Chinese' in their philosophy of government than the Chinese themselves. Hong Kong was described in 1977 as the ‘last remaining place where Chinese people are governed on principles traditional to their civilization'.
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Tiananmen Square harmed China and obscured the fact that British rule in Hong Kong shared many of the values espoused by Confucius and other authoritarian thinkers in the Chinese tradition, particularly prizing the traditional Confucian ideals of order, hierarchy, stability and continuity.

Chris Patten, the last principal character in the history of British rule in Hong Kong, was, like Mrs Thatcher, an ideological warrior. Although, in British terms, he had been a centrist figure, he remains passionately committed to liberal political philosophy. In his book,
East and West
, his personal account of the last days of colonial rule in Hong Kong, he freely quotes De Tocqueville, among other heroes of the liberal tradition. This is admirable, but it is historically inaccurate to project those values on to the British Empire. Patten was made governor of Hong Kong in 1992 as a consolation prize. As the general election strategist for the Conservative Party, he had helped ensure that John Major, his friend and contemporary, was re-elected prime minister, but he himself had lost his seat as MP for Bath. On arrival in Hong Kong, Patten immediately made an impact. He was firm in his conviction that ‘the people of Hong Kong should be consulted, and progress would reflect their wishes'.
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It was fitting that the last imperial governor of any significance should have been a graduate of Balliol, Oxford, which had produced so many imperial civil servants in the century since Benjamin Jowett, a late nineteenth-century master of the college, had promised to ‘inoculate England with Balliol'. Yet Patten's philosophy and manner were very different from the calm and considered manner of the Imperial Civil Service. He had a
glib turn of phrase, but knew very little about China or diplomacy. He rather perversely thought that his lack of knowledge of Chinese was a good thing, and boasted of having visited Hong Kong ‘three times' before he became governor.
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He described himself as a ‘democratic politician, through and through', and this was true. If he had not been voted out by his constituents in Bath, he would never have become governor of Hong Kong, so he owed his career, even more than most politicians, to the decisions of democratic electorates.

It would be inaccurate to say that Patten was not conscious of Hong Kong's history. He was one of the first to call the colony's form of government ‘benign authoritarianism'.
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Immediately after leaving Oxford he had joined Conservative Central Office, where he showed his abilities as an organizer and originator of policy. He ended up as head of the research department there, before being elected to Parliament, at the age of thirty-five, in 1979. He went on to acquire extensive experience in domestic British politics, but spoke no foreign languages, had never lived outside Britain and had no professional training in law; nor had he undergone the usual Balliol grounding in the Classics which, although Greek and Roman civilization had long perished, did at least, its devotees argued, expose the student to a rigorous discipline in the languages and mentality of alien cultures. The cadet in Hong Kong was expected to spend two years in Canton and learn Cantonese. In other colonial jurisdictions, district commissioners were expected to learn some local languages and the rudiments of law. Thus, in many ways, Patten was among the least qualified graduates of Balliol College, Oxford ever to hold high office in the British Empire.

With his passionate belief in democracy and his dogmatic manner, Patten infuriated the Foreign Office mandarins and members of the Hong Kong business community. As Percy Cradock observed, China was a fact of life: ‘if we wished to serve Hong Kong we had to remain able to talk to Peking'. His realism made fun of the ‘chimerical alternative policy, which would somehow be tougher with Peking and at the same time more beneficial to Hong Kong'.
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Cradock, a former Cambridge law don, who became a diplomat in his early thirties, was of the old school. He believed that the general approach of Foreign Office officials from 1979 to 1992 of
trying to accommodate China on the question of Hong Kong could not be ‘seriously faulted'. He recognized that it would have been better if ‘democracy could have been long rooted in Hong Kong', but democracy had been actively opposed by Grantham, Black and MacLehose, who had collectively ruled Hong Kong for twenty-seven of the thirty-five years between 1945 and 1980.
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Henry Keswick, the hereditary chairman of Jardine Matheson, Hong Kong's greatest merchant company, had made the same claim before a House of Commons Select Committee in May 1989, a couple of weeks before the Tiananmen Square massacre: ‘the fact is, we have not introduced democracy in Hong Kong, so that Hong Kong [could] choose its own leaders and its own future'.
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Patten sought to consolidate democracy in Hong Kong, which he believed to be a legacy of British imperialism, but which was certainly unhistorical with regard to Hong Kong and much of the imperial past. In this attempt, he managed to antagonize the Chinese on the mainland, as well as the colony's business community who simply wanted to carry on making money in their ‘merchant city'.
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Having being appointed governor in July 1992, Patten promptly upset the Chinese, in October, by announcing proposals to make the legislative system in Hong Kong more democratic. This not only, in the Chinese view, went against 150 years of British tradition, it also violated the tacit assumption that China would have the ultimate say in Hong Kong's future, because Patten had failed to inform Beijing in advance of the democratic reforms he announced. Even as late as 1991, the first time elections were properly free and openly contested, forty-two of the sixty members of the Legislative Council were either appointed by the Governor or selected ‘by “election committees” and from the “functional constituencies” which represented powerful professional bodies in the colony'.
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Patten's attempts to impose greater democracy in Hong Kong, at this eleventh hour of British rule, baffled and surprised the Chinese. Patten saw himself as a champion of democratic rights, but the Foreign Office establishment, typified by Percy Cradock, viewed him as, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a grave threat to Sino-British relations. Cradock was conscious that a Hong Kong without China was inconceivable; whatever happened, Hong Kong would have to be part of China. He believed therefore that ‘it was one thing to be defiant when
we in Britain would bear the consequences ourselves', but to be ‘defiant at the expense of a third party, particularly one to whom we stood in a position of trust, as with Hong Kong, was something very different, an inexcusable self-indulgence'.
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