The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong

by Jonathan Dimbleby

In July 1997, Hong Kong will ceased to be a British colony and reverted to the People's Republic of China. Five million people lost their status as British subjects and became citizens of a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. It was always clear that the last five years of British rule would be fraught with uncertainty. For this reason, the appointment of the former Chairman of the Conservative Party, Chris Patten, in June 1992 as the last governor of Hong Kong, was greeted with widespread approval. With rare and priveleged access to the governor and his team, the author provides an insight into events leading up to the handover, including reasons why relations between China and Britain were at their lowest ebb for a generation. The situation is placed in its human and historical context.

Genres: History, Politics, Biography, Nonfiction, British Literature, China

480 pages, Hardcover

First published July 10, 1997

About the author

Jonathan Dimbleby is a writer and filmmaker based in England. His five-part series on Russia was broadcast by BBC2 and accompanied by his book Russia: A Journal to the Heart of a Land and its People. Destiny in the Desert was recently nominated for the Hessell-Tiltman History Prize.

Reviews

[E Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book piqued my interest as the handover of Hong Kong marked the de facto end of the British Empire. Ahead of reading the book I watched the footage from the 1997 ceremony of bekilted squaddies folding up the union flag in front of Jiang Zemin and a noticably uncomfortable Charlie Windsor.

It was unanimously agreed that Hong Kong would not stay British territory, but in what form? The island of Hong Kong was held by Britain due to an “unequal treaty” and the New Territories under a 99 year lease. A once obscure outpost developed into a booming financial statelet. Hong Kong was a beacon of western capitalism ringed by Communist China, but it had never been a democracy. When Chris Patten arrived in 1992 as the final Governor, the future of Hong Kong was a fait accompli. It had been agreed in 1984 that China would take control of the colony on the expiry of the 99 year lease signed in 1898 (although an independent city state status like Singapore had been mooted by the Thatcher cabinet). It seems to me that at various times both Beijing and Westminster were ambivalent towards Hong Kong until the political and economic sands shifted in latter half of the 20th century.

Jonathan Dimbleby writes in a light and accessible way which befits him as a journalist and broadcaster. The historical story of Hong Kong itself was fairly brief, but the book shines with unprecedented access to many of the key figures involved in the administration of Hong Kong and negotiation of the handover so to see much of the discourse interspersed with interview quotes is refreshing. I also enjoyed reading about the hopes and fears of the ordinary people of Hong Kong. The last 5 years of British rule was a tense time and Patten’s attempts to redefine the role of Governor and try to democratise the colony after 150 years of mercantile rule proved difficult and the relationship with Beijing inevitably became strained. To assume they were bilateral negotiations is naive, as at various times Beijing, Hong Kong, Westminster, the international community, business leaders, former politicians, banks, political parties and campaigners all stuck their oars in.

I cannot agree with all of Patten’s actions, but you are left with the impression that he did what he could with the time that he had. I was struck by his efforts to ensure visa-free travel and secure British passports to those that the British colonial system had shamefully left behind. Sadly it appears efforts to improve the political situation of Hong Kong were far too late and the system had been neglected for far too long. The 1989 Tienanmen Square protests caused huge anxiety about whether the liberties and freedoms enjoyed in Hong Kong were to be maintained after 1997. I was shocked by some of the opinions espoused in the interviews of business leaders that suggested profit is more important than freedom. Patten’s final interviews in the book convey a sense of nervous optimism for “one country, two systems” but underscored that it is for the international community to judge the success of Hong Kong in the future. I am not sentimental for the British Empire (I openly question Westminster’s right to administer Wales, Scotland and the north of Ireland!) but reading the book gave a good insight of the tensions within the territory, particularly in light of the pro-democracy protests in recent years.

[Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Badly and in places incorrectly written this book eventually became a political cause celebre in Britain and may well have fatally damaged Chris Patten 's(the Governor in Question) longer term political ambitions. He was often referred to as "the best prime Minister Britain never had" Patten's own version of the book is a vastly better and more literate read as shown by the fact that after many year's as the European Union's Foreign Affairs Commissioner he is now Chancellor of Oxford University and deservedly Lord Patten. A little biased as I was at University with him albeit from different colleges.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in the year that the British left Hong Kong (1997), there is too much mild polemic and friendship towards the protagonist of the story, Chris Patten, for this to be a definitive history but it is too good to be dismissed as 'journalism'.

Dimbleby is partisan in favour of Patten's attempts to be a liberal democrat in an untenable situation but he does not allow this to get in the way of the facts. The book is likely to be regarded as a fair-minded, reliable and quotable source for future historians.

The book has recently become relevant again because Hong Kong has recently become a touchstone issue in the increasingly fraught relations betweeen the 'West' (which includes many small East Asian and Pacific nations) and China.

From this perspective, the book stands as very useful in answering the question - what has gone wrong? Is it British moral turpitude or incompetence, Chinese intransigeance, the burden of colonial history, over-expectation on the part of Hong Kongers or business cynicism?

The book won't entirely answer those questions but it will help the reader to come to a view on how we got to where we are. The answer is not going to be a simple one or provide easy answers to an ongoing clash of cultures which could contribute to more serious confrontations later.

At times, reading the book is like watching paint dry as the tortuous negotiations over legal and technical matters are provided in necessary but mind-numbing detail, while the political squabbles between Sinologists and politicians make one want to weep at the human race.

Nevertheless, I finished the book and I was glad to do so because I have a much better sense of what the struggle over Hong Kong is about and why it is so intractable. My take on it is not Dimbleby's or Patten's but the facts are all there to justify mine as much as theirs ... or yours.

First, nothing to do with Hong Kong can be seen outside the historical context of a rapacious British Empire humiliating the Chinese Empire. On the other hand, the British created a prosperous trading city out of little more than rock. These two facts make neither contending side 'wrong'.

From a Chinese point of view, the Communist regime restored dignity to the polity and that rock is unfinished business as is (less plausibly) Taiwan. From a British point of view, the Empire created the modernity that China lacked and to which China should continue to aspire.

The Chinese view is stubborn. The British view is still not a little patronising. Where the British failed was in treating the people of Hong Kong as mere imperial raw material in the hands of both British and Chinese capitalists. This was a profitable boat not to be rocked.

The logic of the situation was for one cynical Empire to hand over property, over which it had limited rights and which it could no longer afford to manage, to another Empire for the best price it could negotiate and then bugger off into the sunset.

This was pretty much the view of the cynical British State machine (the Sin0logists in the civil service and the pro-business Tories). They had colluded with China in seeking trade concessions for a neat handover of the Crown Colony with sufficient cover to offload the local population as well.

This is the British at their most pragmatic and greedy and it is something that the Chinese could understand. As a result, absolutely no effort was made to communicate with the local population or to respond to their aspirations other than 'reassuring' fat cat capitalists.

To local business interests, democracy and human rights were so much pie in the sky. So long as they could prosper and create wealth as the capitalist trading outpost of the Chinese Empire, as they had been of the British Empire, the change of ownership was a mere formality.

So what goes wrong? The cynics are suddenly faced by liberal idealism emerging as part of the Tory machine - a tendency that was not unique to the Tories but was central to the later Blair operation and is now dominant in the foreign policy of the Tory Right.

Ooops! Civil servants thought they were running foreign policy. Suddenly jumped up elected politicians are not listening to them. John Major appoints a pal to be Governor of Hong Kong and that pal is a liberal Catholic with strong liberal democratic views.

It was a blunder, of course, if an honourable one but only a blunder because of the prior blunder of allowing British civil servants to follow through on their imperial anti-democratic instincts and treat the people of Hong Kong as so much colonial fodder.

It was all too late and, in case anyone thinks this is a Tory mistake, the same blunder was perpetrated under de-colonising scuttling Labour and Tory administrations alike. The last dregs of empire were problems or tradeable assets but not zones of popular autonomy.

The dregs of the British Empire could have been introduced steadily to rights and democracy from much earlier in the decolonisation process. They would have been established as independent facts on the ground for an incoming empire to deal with.

Of course, that would have been a bad idea for Hong Kong for a good reason ... the outgoing empire could not have guaranteed the security of an independent or autonomous Hong Kong any more than it could defend Singapore in the Second World War.

The second best option was to a introduce a significant degree of democracy and human rights from the 1980s, sufficient to embed liberal democracy alongside capitalism and bind the success of the latter (which is what Beijing cared about) to the success of the former.

And that is at the root of the failure of imagination that we have all come to expect from a negative and depressed British civil service and there were no imaginative politicians in the Thatcher administration capable of scenario planning in a different way from the Sinologists.

So, instead of over a decade of gradual democratisation and embedment of rights, in comes a rather second division but not unintelligent and decent politician, Chris Patten, into a wholly untenable situation, inadequately briefed (to an absolutely shocking degree in one key circumstance).

In the end, he faces a China that is not at fault in thinking that it has an 'understanding' with the British Empire and which subsequently finds that it is faced by (in their view and that of the Sinologists and their business pals) an unprofessional gad fly stirring up the locals.

In other words, Hong Kong is the victim of the very late discovery of the British of a sort of cack-handed moral idealism - the sort that infected at the cost of many lives, the subsequent Prime Minister Tony Blair - without the time or means to make it practical in Hong Kong.

Worse, without having any power to do anything about what is going to happen to these people when the British abandon them, Patten starts giving them hope and creating expectations and encouraging democratic behaviour at the very last minute when it will be most provocative.

The British have failed to behave decently for so long that a decent man arriving at the last minute can only posture and create problems for the future. The Chinese are confused and angry and the real villains (British civil servants and business) skulk and undermine their own man.

And that is when the story ends in this book. A naive and intellectually lazy Prime Minister has rewarded a pal whose inherent decency and sense of honour tries to correct the amoral and cynical behaviour of his own State but far too late to do anything except stir up trouble for the future.

And a quarter of a century later we are where we are now. Many Hong Kongers want the Western freedoms they should have been granted half a century ago under the rule of a communist-capitalist dictatorship quite capable of crushing by force any dissent on its territory.

But be in no doubt, it is Chinese territory because the British gave it to them and bits of paper (as we know from Brexit) are of no consequence when it comes to sovereign interest. The Chinese can do what they like if they accept the trading and other consequences. And they probably can and will.

The poor Hong Kongers have been left in the worst of worlds ... dumped unceremoniously by their old elite, where half of them just want to do business but the other half think of themselves as Westerners and want the same level of freedom as Westerners.

Their new masters are not happy that the British set an ideological ticking bomb inside their own empire and they are not fools in knowing that special interests (notably neo-conservative American interests) are trying to light a fuse that they hope will result in revolt in Shanghai and Beijing.

The Sinologists, meanwhile, wasted their careers. Partly due to business negativity over Brexit, the Tory populists have abandoned the 'business first' foreign policy of their predecessors and have developed their own brand of neo-conservatism but far too late to help the Hong Kongers.

There is not much to be done. Hong Kongers cannot be protected by the West because of the risks of direct confrontation but cannot fight for they want without being crushed, jailed and 'martyred'. The Hong Kongers are now just propaganda pawns in a dirty game.

This book helps us to assign blame. Given what we know of Communism in China, the Chinese are just being true to their nature - they are scorpions and they sting. Patten, too, was naive and probably did more harm than good but he was the victim of circumstance.

The blame is clear. British arrogance and cynicism under a State that, even now, has an instinct against democracy. Until the British State is brought under democratic control and values, blunders like this (not that there are many more bits of empire to screw over) will continue.

Nor is it a 'Tory' State that we are condemning here. There is no substantive difference between Tory and Labour administrations in their cynicism and laziness. Labour has ousted the non-cynical Corbyn as inconvenient and the Tories have come to liberal democratic values late in the day.

The most depressing story in the book was that of the Government's (a Tory decision, in this case) failure to offer free British citizenship to servants of the Crown. It was as if they were just employees to be transferred from one corporation to another to be fired in an asset strip.

Only 20% of serving British-Chinese military got passports that mattered, leaving the other 80% as potential pariahs in their own PLA-dominated city. We are still behaving unconscionably in Iraq where our translators are going to be dumped on the tender mercies of local militia when we leave.

While every European Tom, Dick and Harry was going to be let in to the UK to feed the maw of British business' hunger for cheap labour and European markets, the Government reaction was to limit migration from overseas even when we had a debt of honour. 'Racial', surely not?

So, a worthwhile work of contemporary history by a diligent and committed British journalist, this account of the last days of British Hong Kong under its last Governor is a good factual guide to the decision-making of that period. You can interpret the same facts as I did in your own way.

[Kiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I likely would have never read without living in Hong Kong, it is a stunning look at misunderstood former British colony. Dimbleby was given unprecedented access to the governor and the government of Hong Kong in the five years leading up to the 1997 handover back to China. After Britain fought and won the opium wars in the mid to late 19th century, Hong Kong island, with a larger section of New Territories (where I live now) were handed to the British government in a now infamous lease. The entire process was quite dirty, and yet this territory took on a unique place in a globalizing world, a refuge for global trade and global refugees, a haven for super rich and poor, that encapsulated they best and worst the globalized culture can offer. In the 80s the governments of Britain and China began the complicated diplomatic process of ending the lease, and ending the life of Britain’s last major colony. China’s appetite for total rule met the West’s appetite for open trade and many comprises were reached, and that without the voice of the common people. The most tragic of which was the decision to withhold free elections until after the 1997 handover. Between the 80s and 1997 a Joint Declaration and a Basic Law were penned in an effort to enshrine a “through train” of compromises between Hong Independence and Chinese rule after the handover. The debate continues as to how well those legalities have been interpreted and followed, with recent events more than suggesting that differences on these matters have only festered. The author’s primary goal is to show what a mess of diplomacy governor Patton was handed, and how well he did in spite of it, accomplishing much for the voice of the people in his tenure where his predecessors failed, and lowering the British flag over HK with dignity, having given HK its own political culture with which to endure in the process. 576 pages of imperial British twilight, diplomacy, and clashing worldviews that remain.

[Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of my favourite books of all time. Jonathan Dimbleby has written an enthralling account of the fascinating handover of Hong Kong in 1997 and the years preceding it when Chris Patten served as Governor. There is enough background information provided and input from various stakeholders (a sanitation worker, tycoons, students, pro-Beijing politicians, pro-democracy politicians, a policeman among others)interspersed in the book to place the complex issues which needed settling between Britain and China in perspective and give the reader a sense of the enormity of what the handover was: changing a city of 6 million people at the stroke of midnight in June 1997. The vivid account of the political and diplomatic intrigue and drama that surrounded all of Chris Patten's agenda is impossible to put down and has been flawlessly written. Much like Patten's influence and power, though, the book loses its spark towards the end as everyone - the key players in the book included - knows what happens next. The epilogue is especially rambling.

[Patrick Schmid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biographies are probably more difficult to write than they are to read and this book is no exception...but it is still fascinating in that it is not only a part-biography but also a documentary of the intricacies of Sino-British relations and diplomacy over the course of Hong Kong's 150 years as a British colony. It draws on some unique analogies of Britain and how it and those appointed to represent it, handled different parts of its vast empire at different periods of time. Both overtly and by implication it gives some impressive insights into the people, methods and thinking that determined much of what we live and experience today. It is a little too detailed or dry for me personally, at some junctures but it is still an excellent book and any reader should push past the difficult sections and take in the impressive education this book offers on the whole.

[Jacques Meldrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good book that provides a fantastic insight into the years prior to the largest milestone in Hong Kong's history. Written throughout Patten's governorship, the book was conceived with the notion that it would be published prior to 1997, and subsequently, it was.

[Todd Denning · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good and interesting read. Dimbleby effectively conveys a remarkable insight into the nature of late-colonialism, an often forgotten branch of Britain’s imperial past.
Although often fascinating, the book is focused almost solely on democracy in Hong Kong. Little more than a few paragraphs are dedicated to reforms beyond the democratic. In this sense, the book is lacking some of the depth I’d hoped to get surrounding Patten’s governorship.
As a result, some topics are introduced (such as details around the Chinese blocking of the airport and container port construction) are introduced as serious obstacles but later concluded within a sentence, never inspecting how these issues were broken down.

I can’t say whether this book is the best there is to offer on Hong Kong, but undoubtedly a more contemporary consideration of Patten’s reforms in light of current events would be interesting/ necessary.

[Christopher Trend · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting account of the last 5 years of British rule in Hong Kong. The author is a friend and admirer of Chris Patten, the last governor, and that has to be allowed for in some of the account.
It does show how fragile democracy is and how hard it can be to achieve an open democratic society especially when there are those opposed from the diplomatic, business and political communities.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fittingly dramatic and "no holds barred" insight into the handover and transition of Hong Kong from British and into Chinese hands. Recommended reading alongside Sir Sze-Yuen Chung's 'Hong Kong's Journey to Reunification' and Sir Percy Cradock's 'Experiences of China'.