When the Royal Navy lowered its flag for the last time on Hong Kong island in 1993, commander-in-chief Governor Chris Patten was elsewhere. In a carefully calculated political move, he was dining with the men and women of the press, at the Hong Kong Journalists Association’s 25th anniversary ball. Sitting next to him was my father Jack Spackman, a Governor Watcher since 1967.
Without the might of its navy, Britain never would have gained a foothold in China in the mid-1800s. Hong Kong was taken in the first of the skirmishes with China that became known as the Opium Wars.
However the prize was not greeted with much enthusiasm – then Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston famously dismissed the place as a ‘barren rock’ hardly worth the cost of defending.
As an aside, ‘Barren Rock’ was a project of Jack’s which never got off the ground – Hong Kong’s version of Rolling Stone, with a healthy influence of Private Eye in style. We had it mapped out to a pretty strong degree but never found the time to take it anywhere.
Back to history, and Britain grudgingly installed a fairly traditional 19th century colonial style of government for its new possession, one in which local people had practically no say in the running of their affairs.
For a century and a half Britain sent a succession of Foreign Office diplomats to govern its most important colony. They wore fancy uniforms and plumed hats and generally had a lackey around to write speeches for them.
In my father’s long experience of governors – covering, in order, Sir David Trench, Sir Murray Maclehose, Sir Edward Youde and Sir David Wilson – they did not give interviews or feel much compunction to communicate with the citizenry.
Therefore he was surprised and delighted at the new style brought to the role by Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor.
By the time Patten arrived in 1992, the inexorable path towards Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 was largely set. The troublesome question of greater democracy for Hong Kong was being soothingly glossed over as something that local people didn’t really want, or if they did, it was probably because they didn’t really understand the complexities of the issue.
Patten, a professional politician, changed all that. He had lost his seat in the April 1992 election and with it his career prospects in UK politics. The gift of an overseas posting in such circumstances was a tradition of Empire. But Patten was distinctly untraditional in his approach.
Spackman had left Hong Kong for California by the time Patten was installed but he witnessed firsthand the new style of “off-the-cuff, baby-kissing” governing when he returned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the trades union he had founded in 1968.
There were 800 people waiting in the Convention Centre when Patten and his wife Lavender arrived, Spackman said, and it appeared from the moment they entered the room that he was probably the most popular governor ever to fill the post.
Patten had barely settled in to his chair next to Spackman when he reached for the dinner menu and turned to the back page. “Excuse me,” he said, as he uncapped his pen. “I have to get a speech together.”
He hadn’t made much progress when a woman bobbed down at his elbow, bending low so as not to block diners’ view of the stage and the head table. She thrust her copy of the menu at him and he scrawled his signature across it.
“Are you signing autographs?” Spackman asked. Patten grinned widely. “You betcha!”
“And do you always leave your speech writing to the last minute?”
“I’m not writing it, just making notes. Nobody writes speeches anymore.”
“The style of government in Hong Kong has changed in my absence, from the sedate to the brisk,” Spackman said later in an article he wrote for his newspaper in California, the Tri-Valley Herald.
This breath of fresh air had clearly pleased the majority of Hong Kong’s 6 million people. And even today, 20 years after the sun finally set on this little corner of Empire, there’s a lot of affection for Patten and his family.
But across the border in China Patten was the butt of daily diatribes and insults because of his efforts to put some democracy into the Hong Kong political system, while hoping it would survive after 1997.
About the only electoral opportunity for local politicians was the prospect of a seat on the Urban Council, whose functions mostly were confined to cleaning the streets and putting on concerts.
In the decade prior to 1993 things had opened up a little so that fully 18 of the 60 seats on the more powerful Legislative Council were filled by elected representatives. The majority of seats went to members appointed by the governor. And even for the elected seats, not everyone got a vote.
“Patten set out to do what other governors should have done decades ago, and that was to widen the democratic process, although his plans for reform still fell way short of any one-person one-vote concept,” Spackman said.
Nevertheless, China was crying foul and demanding that Britain honour an agreement signed in 1984 on the future of Hong Kong and which, China said, ruled out any significant changes in the political system before the 1997 handover.
So unpopular had Patten become with the mainland authorities that even when he spoke up on China’s behalf he still ran into flak.
A month before the HKJA Press Ball, while on a trip to Washington, Patten had set out to convince the Clinton administration to retain Most Favoured Nation status for China.
“Some American leaders were keen to remove Most Favoured Nation status from China as a warning that the world had not forgotten Tiananmen Square four years before,” Spackman said. Patten argued for its retention, if only to save jobs in Hong Kong which would be affected by any trade fallout from an American action.
“For his trouble Patten came under strong attack in the Chinese media. One newspaper labelled him a ‘whore, grabbing every opportunity to strut coquettishly and act like a spoiled brat’ in Washington.”
There were contrasting attitudes in Hong Kong towards Patten among the people depending on him to take care of their political interests. The strong and differing opinions were on full display at the HKJA Press Ball.
As he jotted his speech notes the people manning the microphones kept up a barrage of jokes about him, all of which Patten accepted with a grin, Spackman said.
“The place erupted when Lavender Patten, drawing lucky numbers from a barrel, came up with the governor’s ticket, thereby entitling him to a cash cheque for $2,500 donated by Hong Kong’s richest property tycoon Li Ka-Shing.
“Patten held on to it just long enough to donate it to the fundraising efforts of his hosts. More cheers.”
The band struck up a tango, the signal for everyone to clap and shout for the Pattens to get out on the dance floor and strut their stuff. And then to the microphone, ostensibly to sing a song, strode a woman lawyer, Lin Yiu-Chu, a Hong Kong citizen whose political loyalties were firmly with Beijing.
Lin was an appointed representative to China’s National People’s Congress and in recent years had shunned the English name she previously had favoured. “Don’t call me Dorothy,” she insisted. Some, to emphasise her political attachments, had tagged her ‘Miss Beijing.’
Having taken over the microphone, she failed to sing a note. Instead, she launched into an attack on Patten and his policies.
“He should, she suggested, get out and work in the fields as a peasant to learn some humility. And in an oblique reference to Bath, the English city of his birth, she advised him to go home and take a shower,” Spackman said.
Patten’s presence at the journalists’ ball was a major disappointment to Royal Navy brass who had been expecting him to attend their big event that same evening.
As a prelude to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, the British navy was moving to a small island out in the harbour. The decommissioning of HMS Tamar, the Royal Navy’s base sitting on a vast tract of prime real estate next to Central, was an historically significant moment.
But when the navy lowered the flag at Tamar for the last time the commander-in-chief was not there to take the salute and pay tribute to military might.
Patten was a mile away, stressing the need for a free and vigorous press. And Spackman, that old Governor Watcher, heartily approved.
© Maria Spackman 2017
Further reading:
“One memory sticks in Patten’s mind from his last days in power. During a visit to a psychiatric hospital, just a few weeks before he set sail on the Britannia, he recalls being approached by a patient in a three-piece suit.
“Governor Patten, could I ask you a question?” the man inquired. “You always tell us that Britain is the oldest democracy in the world. So could you explain to me why you are handing over Hong Kong to the last great totalitarian regime without asking the opinion of the people of Hong Kong?”
In spite of their location, it was, Patten says, “the sanest question in Hong Kong”.
“Incredibly sane – and unanswerable. But at least we could have done a bit more to make it answerable.”
Read the rest here:
“I should have done more”: Chris Patten on leaving Hong Kong without democracy – Tom Phillips and Alex Healey, The Guardian, June 28, 2017
Unusually, Patten is a Conservative with a soul. Politics has not de-humanised him. While a bit out of date now, I still recommend his 2005 book ‘Not quite the diplomat’. Thanks for this Sally.