‘We have to give Hong Kong and its way of life the best chance of continuing as a free city after the handover.’ So wrote Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, in his diary just over three years before the transfer of the territory to China on 1 July 1997. We are now halfway through the 50-year period that was meant to preserve Hong Kong’s way of life under the agreement reached between China and Britain in 1984 and Patten has made his thoughts public, motivated to do so by the global outrage at China’s recent Stalinist clampdown in the territory.
Since Patten first recorded his thoughts, thousands of pages have been devoted to the handover negotiations, their aftermath and consequences. Some of the government’s own files from the time are now accessible in the National Archives, although many of them remain closed, due no doubt to an excess of bureaucratic caution of the kind that Patten would find familiar.
The immediate question, therefore, is what can Patten’s diaries offer us that has not already been told? The short answer is his uniquely personal take on the negotiations, his sometimes acerbic but often generous views on other actors, his self-deprecatory humour, seemingly boundless patience and, by no means least, a series of delightful one-liners. Surely no scholarly report or Foreign Office telegram will have described a free Hong Kong under the Chinese Communist Party as ‘an oxymoronic contradiction on stilts’. As the diaries also show, Patten was a politician of integrity and principle, something once taken for granted, but sadly lacking today.
