How Beijing’s new man in Hong Kong can avoid Chris Patten’s fatal miscalculations

Like Patten, Beijing’s Luo Huining is an odd choice for Hong Kong, a political heavyweight after a succession of technocrats. Let’s hope Luo resists the temptation to rapidly acquire firm views, acts more transparently than his predecessors and builds some trust

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Luo Huining, the new director of Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong, is an accomplished politician who has successfully tackled problems regarded by many as intractable. Photo: May Tse

Published: 6:00am, 13 Jan 2020Updated: 2:41pm, 13 Jan 2020

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.