The Hong Kong Diaries

Product Information

But he had one supreme advantage – the loyal backing of John Major, the prime minister, and Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, back in London. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Patten has now published his diaries of five tumultuous years in office, from 1992 to 1997, recording battles against the comrades, the tycoons, the doubters in the cabinet and mandarins everywhere. Unexpectedly, his opponents included not only the Chinese themselves, but some British businessmen and civil service mandarins upset by Patten's efforts, for whom political freedom and the rule of law in Hong Kong seemed less important than keeping on the right side of Beijing.Patten's best efforts, Hong Kong became the canary in the mine shaft, showing what happens when the Chinese Communist Party is allowed to get its way.

Nonetheless the sheer amount of hard work and effort he and his staff in HK put in to ensure the handover went as well as it did is to be applauded. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In The Hong Kong Diaries Chris Patten details his struggle as the last governor of Hong Kong to energise the dying days of British rule. It is valuable that his diary entries include views and analyses that were very different from his (some of which he vilified). Over the next five years he kept this diary, which describes in detail how Hong Kong was run as a British colony and what happened as the handover approached.This takes the form of a passionate polemical essay, written as a postscript to the diaries, about China’s increasingly brutal sabotage of the Hong Kong deals. As an insider's account, The Hong Kong Diaries is filled with that daily sense of grappling with a multi-headed hydra . In the course of his diaries, Patten argues convincingly that for Britain or any other country to abandon liberal principles and yield to the Chinese Communist party's demands at every opportunity brings neither political nor commercial benefits. p.371-2); “Efforts to give Hong Kong the civilized standards we require are denounced as drags on our competitiveness and as examples of my Fabian socialism. details his persistent but ultimately failed efforts to secure the continuance of Hong Kong's freedoms .

It struck me that in hindsight we had the benefit of some effective political figures, including John Major, during that time - if only we had known it then. Lord Patten spent much of his time in Hong Kong struggling against British officials and members of the local elite who believed it was not worth trying to push China to accept more democracy in pre-handover Hong Kong-much less expanding it without China's approval.For anyone who has a special interest, ties to and direct experience of HK as I have been lucky to have, this book is a must read.

Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘The politics, in his words, were a “snake pit”.This takes the form of a passionate polemical essay, written as a postscript to the diaries, about China's increasingly brutal sabotage of the Hong Kong deals. Strained relations extended even to his more natural political allies, the Hong Kong democrats led by Martin Lee. But the governor’s frustration with much of the business elite, anxious only to kowtow to Beijing and go on making a lot of money, was almost as great. 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.