As President Xi Jinping’s veteran troubleshooter Luo Huining flew into Hong Kong, signalling a major shift in Beijing’s approach to our troubled city, I was reminded of Mark Twain’s observation: “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” My thoughts fly back to July 1992, and the arrival of Chris Patten as Britain’s last governor, and there are uncanny parallels. At this early stage, the detailed circumstances leading up to Luo’s surprise selection as the new head of the central government liaison office in Hong Kong swirl with as much speculation as substance. But the current narrative is that Xi has unceremoniously ejected Wang Zhimin , the latest in a long line of Hong Kong “experts” concentrated in Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, for having failed so abysmally to keep Beijing reliably informed on the mood and developments in Hong Kong. In place of this technocrat, he has appointed an accomplished politician who has successfully tackled problems regarded by many as intractable, first in Qinghai and then in coal-corrupt Shanxi . Having passed the statutory retirement age, Anhui native Luo was being put out to pasture as deputy director of the finance and economic affairs committee of the National People’s Congress. That was December 28. A week later, Luo’s NPC job was off, and he was pushed onto a plane down to Hong Kong. Credentials exclude experience either of Hong Kong or international affairs, but Luo arrives as a sophisticated and proven political operator trusted at the most senior party levels. At the end of his career, he has nothing to prove. Nor does he have any “baggage” with the Hong Kong tycoons or the Chinese business mafia based in Hong Kong that have, for the past three decades, provided Beijing with most of its political counsel. Why the parallels with Chris Patten and 1992? First, Patten’s arrival marked the end of two decades of British foreign policy towards China and Hong Kong dominated by the Foreign Office’s “panda mafia”. This “mafia”, which included Percy Cradock, Edward Youde, Alan Donald and Robin McLaren – all of whom also spent time as ambassadors to Beijing – had negotiated the Sino-British Joint Declaration over Hong Kong’s future, signed in 1984. They were also leading the implementation of the transition from British to Chinese sovereignty, in tricky circumstances where Beijing’s suspicions of the motives of “Perfidious Albion” were intense. These included a managed transition towards democratic government – which included a “through train” enabling the Legislative Council to remain in power beyond 1997 – and a decade-long programme of bureaucratic exchanges and secondments intended to build trust and familiarity with each others’ sharply different systems. In Britain, particularly after Tiananmen in 1989 , criticism of the panda mafia’s handling of the transition mounted. When Patten, then chairman of the Conservative Party, surprisingly lost his parliamentary seat despite engineering the 1992 victory of John Major’s Conservative government, a meaningful political job had to be found for him somewhere. In short, this hard-hitting British political figure arrived in Hong Kong in 1992 with blood still in his nostrils from the hard-fought election that year, with no fondness for the transition strategy of the panda mafia, and a passionate priority to push a democratising agenda in Hong Kong. As Cradock wrote icily in a 1997 article in Prospect magazine: “Patten came new to the area, but he rapidly acquired firm views.” With “instant democracy his slogan”, he forced through Legco reforms that Cradock argued did catastrophic damage to efforts to coax a paranoid and sceptical Beijing into acceptance of gradual democratisation. The rest is now history. Beijing responded hysterically to Britain’s perfidy. Patten was condemned as a “two-headed snake” and “ a sinner for a thousand generations ”. The “through train” plans were jettisoned. Bureaucratic exchanges were abruptly halted. From then on, senior Chinese officials refused all contact with Hong Kong’s last governor, greatly hampering the smoothness of the transition. While Cradock died in 2010, his 1997 thoughts remain prescient. Condemning Patten’s democratising mission as “a fatal miscalculation”, he argued that Patten, by encouraging “unreal expectations”, had inflicted permanent harm on Hong Kong’s progress towards democracy under the “ one country, two systems ” formula. “Hong Kong society itself has been polarised, compelled to choose between present and future masters, and mainland political infiltration has been greatly accelerated,” he wrote. “Unilateral action by the British side has provided a perfect pretext for tinkering by the Chinese.” He wondered if it might have been “a case of the politicians overruling the professionals and getting it wrong”. Jump forwards 27 years, and the eerie parallels are clear. Hindsight tells us that the British government was probably wrong to throw aside the panda mafia. Their strategic counsel, while controversial, was probably correct. Replacing them with a Rottweiler governor with his own strong political agenda was probably a mistake. Looking at Wang and Beijing’s obscure “Hong Kong mafia”, the quality of their counsel seems to have been poor , perhaps wilfully misguided. The case for throwing them aside in favour of a strong political leader seems better justified than was the case in 1992. Did Beijing’s echo chamber render it deaf to Hong Kong’s distress? Like Patten, Luo is “new to the area”. One must hope that, unlike Patten, he resists the temptation to rapidly acquire firm views. His first priority must be to act more transparently than his predecessors. Trust can only be built if his policies and actions occur in clear view. Practically, his next priority is presumably to manage a dignified exit for Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and most of her team, and to find (suitably politically competent) successors. The next must be to reach out to the community – including our new district counsellors – to prepare for Legco elections in autumn and the chief executive election in 2022. He must surely encourage an end to the policy inertia that is stalling progress on important bread-and-butter challenges, such as housing , the minimum wage and pensions . And his early visit to Shenzhen to meet the mayor and party chief speaks volumes about plans to build closer economic links within the Greater Bay Area. Overturning the technocrats and replacing them with a political heavyweight is a high-risk strategy, but it is perhaps exactly what is needed to help Hong Kong turn a new corner. Let us hope Luo can avoid Patten’s “fatal miscalculations”. David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view