The “what-ifs” of history are an entertaining intellectual pastime but are also a reminder of how random events can have a major impact on world affairs. What if Adolf Hitler had died in infancy? What if the Southern states had won the American Civil War and seceded from the Union? Less dramatically, but still of great significance to Hong Kong, what if Chris Patten hadn’t lost his parliamentary seat in the United Kingdom’s 1992 general election?
I’ve been ruminating on this last scenario since reading Patten’s autobiographical book, First Confession: A Sort of Memoir. In it, he describes how the electors in his Bath constituency voted him out of office, despite him being their sitting member of Parliament (MP), chairman of the Conservative Party and architect of the Conservatives’ overall election victory. If the good people of Bath had voted differently that day, Patten would have continued as their MP with a prominent role in British government. He would not have been awarded the “consolation prize” of becoming governor of Hong Kong.
The consequences of this would have been dramatic. Before Patten’s appointment, all of Hong Kong’s governors had been civil servants rather than politicians. In all likelihood, this pattern would have continued, and a safe pair of hands would have been chosen to smooth the path from British to Chinese rule in the five-year approach to 1997. At that time, there was much talk of the “through train”, an image which reflected the desire to see a smooth, trouble-free and uncontroversial transition, as agreed in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. As part of this, it had been agreed by both sides, and guaranteed in the Basic Law of Hong Kong, that half of the seats of the Legislative Council would be directly elected within 10 years of China’s resumption of sovereignty, by 2007. For the through train to be possible, no further electoral changes were to be made without China’s authorization. This arrangement, supported by Hong Kong’s cautious civil servants, would most likely have been honored had the usual breed of governor been appointed in 1992.
It was at this point that the electors of Bath put the cat amongst the pigeons. Patten’s arrival in Hong Kong heralded a sea change in how things were done. Unlike his predecessors, this was a man accustomed not only to the adversarial cut and thrust of UK politics, but also to running things, whether as a secretary of state, or a leading cabinet member, or chairman of the ruling Conservative Party. If the British prime minister’s intention was for his newly appointed governor to shake things up in Hong Kong, it certainly worked. Unfortunately, it also had the effect of derailing the through train. Specifically, Patten decided that the right thing to do now was to rush through democratic reforms which went further and faster than those agreed with China.
In his first Policy Address in October 1992, he vowed that all the seats of the Legislative Council would be democratically elected in 1995, just two years before the handover. This rushed and unilateral acceleration in the pace of the democratization of Hong Kong put Patten in a confrontational relationship with China. When his political reform package was passed by the Legislative Council in 1994, Beijing decided to terminate the originally planned through-train arrangement, and to set up its own Provisional Legislative Council.
So much for a smooth transition of power. The through train had well and truly crashed, and acrimony rather than harmony was to characterize the last couple of years of British rule. Lu Ping, then director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, even went so far as to denounce Patten, somewhat intemperately, as a “sinner to be condemned for thousands of years”.
Patten was, and still is, a highly intelligent, eloquent and perceptive political operator. So it’s puzzling to understand why he acted in such a way. He clearly believed he was doing the right thing by unilaterally accelerating democracy in Hong Kong just two years before the handover.
Whatever his motivation, it’s certainly true that his actions helped to polarize the political landscape in Hong Kong, unrealistically raising the expectations of Hong Kong people that they could establish full democracy immediately, irrespective of Beijing’s wishes for a slower, more evolutionary pace of change. He must have known that his demolition of the through train would provoke a strong reaction from Beijing and that this would create greater division in post-handover Hong Kong. Instead of the slower, evolutionary progress towards democracy that had been accepted by all sides, the immediate reversal of the Patten reforms in 1997 enabled the pro-democrats to now portray Beijing as reactionary rather than collaborative, very much setting the tone for the next two decades.
In the Hong Kong chapter of Patten’s autobiography, he quotes the 19th-century political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, author of L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, who wrote that authoritarian regimes are at their most vulnerable when they begin the process of reform. Maybe Patten had this in mind when he forged ahead with his Hong Kong reforms, knowing full well that the taste of radical reform and the inevitable subsequent Chinese reaction against it would generate problems for both Beijing and the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.
These problems eventually came to a head in the 2019-20 protests, initially in opposition to a proposed extradition law, then morphing into demands for greater democracy,
The national security laws, subsequently enacted in 2020 and 2024, were designed to prevent any recurrence of the appalling violence and destructiveness which the rioters inflicted on the SAR. The laws were based on similar legislation in Western countries, including the UK, but this didn’t stop Patten, over 20 years after leaving Hong Kong, condemning the new laws as “another large nail in the coffin of human rights and the rule of law in Hong Kong”. This week, he went further, undermining Hong Kong’s independent Judiciary by describing the Court of Final Appeal’s verdict on Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and other defendants as “unjust” and even attacking the highly respected former head of the Supreme Court of the UK, Lord Neuberger, for being “party to this decision”.
These inflammatory comments have been parried most effectively elsewhere, but it was still disappointing to read them, especially in the context of his autobiography and one of his most quotable lines: “Self-righteousness is a curse of the judgmental liberal.” This wonderful turn of phrase points out the folly of condemning others for not upholding one’s own liberal values without fully appreciating the different context of those people’s experiences. These wise words typified the sort of man I saw in Patten: eloquent, intelligent, perceptive and charming. Along with the students and staff of Sha Tin College, I formed this impression when he spoke and took questions at a school assembly in 1995. I introduced him then as the best prime minister Britain never had, and despite his Hong Kong legacy, I’m still inclined to believe this. My positive impression of him at that time has been reinforced by reading his book. He is clearly an internationalist, a pro-European, an outspoken opponent of Brexit, an enemy of bigotry in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, an anti-right-winger referring disparagingly to “Iain Duncan Smith and his right-wing sidekicks”, a supporter of the protection of minorities, sympathetic to the plight of refugees, and intolerant of the populist rhetoric of people like Donald Trump, whom he refers to as “this vulgar, abusive, ignorant man”.
It’s a mystery to me how such a highly respected politician, whose views are generally so internationalist and enlightened, could have had such a negative impact on Hong Kong and is still sniping from the sidelines. Patten’s current stance on Hong Kong would surely be very different if he hadn’t lost his parliamentary seat in the 1992 general election. He would not have been governor; Hong Kong’s through train would not have been derailed; false expectations would not have been created; the slow evolution of democracy would have progressed; and there would in all likelihood have been no mass protests, no rioting and no hastily enacted national security laws for him to criticize. It can certainly be very thought-provoking to contemplate the “what-ifs” of history.
The author is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
