Tired British diplomacy has little to offer Hong Kong

The news that British Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire failed, during a visit to Hong Kong, to meet Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying earlier this month was interpreted by some as a snub - a sign that both the local and Beijing governments are using whatever symbolic means they can to show the former colonial masters they no longer have much standing in their old terrain.

This interpretation at least grants some political grit to the UK. It is, in spite of everything, a power still worth snubbing.

But there might be a less flattering explanation: even the hapless Leung has limited time to spend with people who offer few ideas. The conclusion most observers might draw over the past few months is that if you are looking for interesting ideas about how to address Hong Kong's challenges, then the UK, and in particular one of its foreign office officials, would be the last place to look.

Britain certainly still offers plenty of public posturing. And it is good at enacting small, dramatic shows that it hopes show, deep down, it still really cares about Hong Kong - witness the aborted visit by British MPs planned late last year. The brutal truth may be that, far from a snub, Leung really did have better, more useful people to see.

We should not be surprised. The UK has, in fact, never had many ideas about Hong Kong - not, at least, in the last half century, beyond supporting its commercial stability and engaging in a tidy colonial retreat. The last governor, Chris Patten, tried to introduce some innovations, but did so under fierce attack from his own side.

Hong Kong, in many ways, is the most visible example of a deeper malaise. British diplomatic thinking, generally, has been characterised almost throughout the postwar period as opportunistic and parasitical at best (keep close to the US, and, in dire need, the EU) or, at worst, bereft of imagination and passion.

I used to work within this apparatus, for the British Foreign Office. And I would say that its presiding ethos a decade ago was fiercely anti-vision. Times may have changed, but the recent approach to Hong Kong has shown that this culture seems to remain in place.

Embassies and consulates, particularly in a place like China, seem frozen in a past created by an old hierarchical and secrecy-loving culture. Far from embracing the opportunities arising from a new China to craft a new narrative of relations, they have maintained a conservative flavour to the relationship.

This saw British Prime Minister David Cameron act like a human-rights-supporting lion in 2012 when he met the Dalai Lama in London, get frozen out of China for a year, then beat a ferocious trade drum where values issues were wholly absent when visiting China in late 2013.

Surely the UK can do better. On China, and on Hong Kong, there are ample opportunities for fresh thinking.

The tragedy is that British posts in China are stuffed full of talented and imaginative people, who, given the chance, could come up with many good ideas, if their political masters let them.

For this to happen, they need support.

One way would be to make the ambassadorship in China a political appointment where someone significant is sent there who actually gets proper access. This is not the case at the moment under the career diplomat system.

Embassies and consulates in China, and elsewhere, need to be more open and diverse. They need to become places judged on their intellectual output, where thinking in different ways is embraced, rather than regarded as abnormal behaviour.

Hong Kong was an issue bequeathed by a generation of British diplomats who were products of the cold war, who regarded any other forms of thought beyond their own narrow idea of rational pragmatism with contempt. The world they had their small successes in has gone.

Now is the time, on an issue like Hong Kong, for the UK to embrace its underdog status and start making others sit up with some new ideas. With such an approach, I imagine VIPs in Hong Kong would actually go out of their way to see Swire.

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney, and associate fellow at Chatham House. His book, What's Wrong with Diplomacy, will be published on March 3