My Take | When will Chris Patten decide to go gently into that good night?
- The more our ageing last governor criticises the city, the more people will re-examine his legacies, of which the bad well outweigh the good
Chris Patten is back in the news, or rather he never left. The latest is his attack on Lord Neuberger, a non-permanent overseas judge on the city’s Court of Final Appeal which has just upheld the convictions of ex-media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and six former opposition lawmakers for taking part in a banned march during the 2019 anti-government riots.
For Patten, the last colonial governor of Hong Kong, and his fellow Western critics, nothing but the immediate unconditional release of Lai would do. The fallen mogul has been portrayed in the West as some kind of saint for media freedom and democracy. But one person’s saint is another’s sinner.
The older Patten gets, the more self-righteous he sounds. Perhaps he is worried about his “legacies” for the city.
But truth be told, the riots were as much his legacy as anything else. He may think he had set Hong Kong on a free, democratic and prosperous path, only to be scuppered by Beijing. What happened is rather different. Maybe he conveniently forgets what he originally set out to do in the city. That makes his support for the BN(O) scheme all the more unforgivable.
He landed in Hong Kong with two potentially big problems for Britain. One, a large number of Hongkongers could be so scared by 1997 that they would demand the right to move to the UK. Two, the British refusal to let them in – along with the complete lack of democracy during the entire British colonial history of Hong Kong – would leave the UK open to the charge that it betrayed its people.
His electoral reforms were his answer. Arguably, he succeeded on both counts, at least for the UK. There was neither a mass demand for UK residency nor mainstream accusations of betrayal, at least not as an established public discourse among most Hong Kong people.
Patten’s actual reforms never made it past July 1, 1997, but they emboldened the local opposition so much that members would end up refusing to work across the aisles in the subsequent years with the business establishment and Hong Kong government.