The Hong Kong Diaries by Chris Patten review – handover notes

The journal of Britain’s last governor makes for candid reading, supplemented by a polemical essay on Hong Kong 25 years on

Chris Patten’s appointment as Hong Kong’s last governor in 1992 marked a cultural change for the colony. His predecessors had mostly been diplomats or administrators – Patten was a senior UK politician with reforming ambitions and a flair for public relations who aroused suspicion in both Beijing and Hong Kong. Many intrigued against him. But he had one supreme advantage – the loyal backing of John Major, the prime minister, and Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, back in London.

Patten’s goal was to ensure the 1997 handover to China went as smoothly as possible, while at the same time entrenching the rule of law and trying to extend democracy. He got some of what he wanted, but it was too little and too late. There were serious ructions with China along the way, and some within Hong Kong itself, about the new airport, passport rights, civil service pensions, Vietnamese refugees and, more than anything else, Patten’s reforms. The politics, in his words, were a “snake pit”.

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