The Hong Kong Diaries

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The world knows that HK is well developed under the leadership of British government, but China people has one sentence: If not China, HK died. 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. Patten’s Hong Kong years have been chronicled before, not least by him, while Jonathan Dimbleby’s account of the road to 1997 was based on extensive on-the-spot access during his governorship.

This is true, but British colonial rule did not take such an enlightened position until the handover was imminent. 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.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. Strained relations extended even to his more natural political allies, the Hong Kong democrats led by Martin Lee. The book concludes with an account of what has happened in Hong Kong since the handover, a powerful assessment of recent events and Patten's reflections on how to deal with China - then and now.

Sadly, many world leaders are still trying to turn a blind eye to tyranny as they naively think shaking hands with them will favour world economy.From reading them, you would never guess how heavily invested British security and intelligence were in Hong Kong.

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. However, the nature of communist wouldn’t change and the fate of Hong Kong has already been written before the handover. 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.a terrific tale, one that will appeal not just to Sinologists but to all historians, since it is effectively a record of the end days of an empire . The first is that the diaries themselves, kept from the time of his appointment in April 1992 to the handover just over five years later, have not been seen before and make for consistently good reading.

But it is also to be treasured for the brilliant and fierce concluding essay on China's recent crackdown which has destroyed Hong Kong's way of life. There is an inescapable poignancy to reading this diary in 2022: it is a snapshot of a unique moment at the end of empire, and a now fading picture of an extraordinary society that flourished in its brief moment of freedom.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.