PeterRS Posted 2 hours ago Posted 2 hours ago Earlier today I came across an old Huffington Post article from 2014 updated to 2017. Given the changing fortunes of Hong Kong there were those who forecast a bright future - like the last pre-July 1 1997 Governor Christopher Patten - and those whose crystal balls predicted a much murkier future. I have made no attempt to to disguise my dislike of Patten, both as a Hong Kong Governor (from 1992)and subsequently as the Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors - a post from which he was fired. I did meet him just once in a very casual setting. He knew nothing about me and my work and he was clearly much more occupied looking around for someone more interesting to chat with. Fair enough. I could never blame someone for that. No, as I have written before, I resented him for his childishly secret - to all but a BBC TV team which he paid to come to Hong Kong several times to witness his shenanigans - attempts to find faults in the two documents which Britain and China had jointly signed laying out Hong Kong's future. They made perfetly clear that not a word could be altered without both parties having agreed in writing. Patten set out to embarrass China into putting Hong Kong on to a much more democratic path. One of those who felt this decade-long faint-hearted attempt at democracy was belated stupidity was a man named John Walden who had been a senior official in the government for decades. As the territory's Director for Home Affairs, he said this - "If I personally find it difficult to believe in the sincerity of this sudden and unexpected official enthusiasm for democratic politics it is because throughout the 30 years I was an official myself, from 1951 to 1981, 'democracy' was a dirty word. Officials were convinced that the introduction of democratic politics into Hong Kong would be the quickest and surest way to ruin Hong Kong's economy and create social and political instability." In 1975, hardly anyone in Hong Kong cared about democracy. There was not even a democratic party - finally formed in 1995. It was Patten who, often secretly, encouraged the rise of democracy, and to hell with what China thought. Yet Hong Kong was dependent on China continuing Hong Kong's laissez-faire attitude to politics and its way of life after 1997. Hong Kong people, most of whom had emigrated from desperately poor circumstances in China, were more interested in a roof over their heads, money in the bank and education for their children. So when Patten unilaterally announced major changes to the Joint Agreements, the Chinese government was as livid as the UK government would have been had the boot been on the other foot. China then cancelled what had been termed the "through train" in terms of how the territory was going to be run and instead installed its own administration. But the democratic forces deliberately unleashed by Patten ewere a Pandora's Box. They took root 15 years later in the student body. And as the world knows, even after demonstration and more demonstrations China did nothing. But eventually it could tolerate it no more, as it became obvious that Hong Kong political views were being aired in the mainland. Thus the clampdown of three years ago and the end of democracy in Hong Kong. Hong Kong which I shall visit again tomorrow is now devoid of the freedoms it once enjoyed and all because one pig-headed man with zero experience of China who should never have been appointed Governor thought he could outwit the old guard in Beijing. He totally failed and thus condemned Hong Kong to a less bright future. In my view John Walden and his government colleagues with similar views was spot on. Quote
