In at the deep end: HKU president remembers Occupy
Peter Mathieson felt compelled to go to the site of the 2014 protests, fearing the worst, a decision he admits was ‘instinctive and emotional’
It was the 185th day after Peter Mathieson had been made the head of the University of Hong Kong when he made a midnight decision to arrange an emergency visit to the Occupy protest zone, believing it was on the brink of bloodshed.
He remembers the day clearly, as the events did not go as expected, even given all the advice on the complexity and challenges in the city he received from someone as familiar to it as Chris Patten, the last British governor, before boarding his one-way flight to Hong Kong.
As he sat down for an interview with the Post on Monday, half way through his five-year appointment, the citywide civil disobedience protests in 2014 still struck him as one of the major challenges he faced at the initial stage of his job.
“It was a baptism by fire for me,” he said, sitting next to a fireplace in a meeting room on the colonial campus.
Four days after police fired tear gas at protesters armed only with umbrellas spilling out into the streets, Mathieson sensed something catastrophic in the making.
“There had been a concern about how this was going to end,” he said, asked if he feared a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. “Was it going to end in violence and ... bloodshed?”
Throughout the day he made repeated contact with people including Yvonne Leung Lai-kwok, then head of the HKU student union and a key figure in the student-led protest.
“I said to her, ‘Would it help if I come down there?’ She said, ‘Yes, I think it would’.”
He decided to go, but he didn’t go alone. He had an agreement with his Chinese University counterpart, Professor Joseph Sung Jao-yiu, that both men were to go together when the need arose.
Mathieson telephoned Sung, telling him: “I’m going to go.”
“When?” Sung asked.
“Now,” Mathieson replied.
“Oh. Now?” asked Sung.
Joking at the reply, Mathieson said: “You could almost imagine him looking at his watch.”
His wife briefly interrupted him before he left home, asking what he was going to say.
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something in the car.”
The rest is history. In retrospect he admitted the duo’s visit to call for restraint was not a carefully thought through plan, but an “instinctive, emotional response”.
About two weeks later, when an end to the protest was out of sight, Mathieson undertook yet another mediator’s role, this time from behind the scenes.
Confirming earlier reports, he said Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor was invited to his official residence to meet with two middlemen: Professor Joseph Chan Cho-wai, a political scientist at HKU, and Gloria Chang Wan-ki, a former HKU student union president.
Details were worked out to facilitate a historic televised dialogue between officials led by Lam and student leaders.
The dialogue, however, yielded little in return.
“It was disappointing that the talks ultimately did not achieve a resolution,” Mathieson said.
Aside from Occupy, Mathieson was also busy grappling with the need to fill senior positions and fighting off doubts as to his suitability for the top job, when he first arrived at HKU.
Critics initially suggested he was not qualified for the job as he lacked Hong Kong experience and was not in a high position at the University of Bristol.
“I needed to convince people that I was capable of doing the job,” he said.
The complexity of Hong Kong was not entirely unexpected to him, having received warnings from “lots of people”, he said.
One of his informants was the city’s last British governor.
“I did meet with him at my request because I felt he knew a lot about Hong Kong.”
Recalling the meeting, which took place at the headquarters of the BBC, of which Patten was board chairman, Mathieson added: “He didn’t particularly warn me about pressures or difficulties. He was actually very complimentary about Hong Kong and about the job I was coming to.”
He was to discover that Patten had left some things out.
