#274 Why Do We Allow Ourselves to be Bullied by These People | Lord Chris Patten
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On this episode of China Unscripted, the last British governor of Hong Kong tells us why Hong Kong was great and how it all went so very, very wrong. Welcome to China Unscripted. I'm Chris Chappell. I'm Shelley Chong. And I'm Matt Gnaizda. Joining us today is Lord Chris Patton, who was the last British governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997. He was until recently the chancellor of Oxford University, and his most recent book is called The Hong Kong Diaries.

Thank you very much for joining us today, Laura Patton. It's an honor to have the chance to speak with you. Delighted to be here. So let's begin. In the acknowledgments of your book, The Hong Kong Diaries, you call what the Chinese Communist Party has done to Hong Kong totalitarian vandalism. Why did you choose that phrase? Well, China is, alas, run at present by a totalitarian regime. And

Because I think in part the Communist Party is terrified by the things that Hong Kong stands for. It's trashed its freedoms and so on in a way which suits a totalitarian state, but obviously destroys the vitality as well as the freedom of an open society. One of our most senior judges recently said that

Hong Kong was on its way just to becoming another totalitarian state, albeit a small one. I think that's pretty well true. And it's a tragedy because Hong Kong was one of the greatest free trading cities in the world. Believing in free trade a lot earlier than many other open societies, it was hugely successful. And what, alas, the Chinese Communist Party thought

was that it could have Hong Kong without Hong Kongers. And that's why so many Hong Kongers have now left and gone into exile. And when you talk to them, what they say is very moving. They say, yes, they miss Hong Kong. They miss their family, their friends, their homes. But the 140,000 or 150,000 who are here in England at the moment say that they came here because they wanted to bring up their children in freedom.

And they say that so often that it has quite an impact on you, because we always assumed that free societies would outlive totalitarianism. And maybe that will be true in due course, because no dictatorship ever ends well. But unfortunately, we're in that stage where Hong Kong and Hong Kong people are still being oppressed. So that's why I use that phrase.

You know, when you look back at, you know, the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, when you look back at how Britain and China negotiated the handover of Hong Kong to China, do you think there could have been more done to try to preserve or protect Hong Kong's freedoms? Well, of course, it's something I've thought about a lot. And the problem in Hong Kong was fairly unique.

To be fair, it was unique for China as well as the United Kingdom. Most of Britain's colonies, and nobody would seek today to justify colonialism, but most of Britain's colonies were prepared for independence.

and you put in place bicameral legislature, democratic elections, rule of law, judges with wigs in courts, all those things that are familiar to those of us who live in open societies. And then when it came to the moment of independence, you would like the blue touch paper and hope that the rocket would be blasted off into orbit as an autonomous state.

But that was never the option for Hong Kong because we'd only acquired part of it forever on a grant. But in terms of land, the largest part of it was on a lease, the 99-year lease. And it was pretty obvious that you couldn't run the island and the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula without the hinterland, which contained seven very large cities.

So we had to negotiate for the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty to China, doing our best to bed down the freedoms in Hong Kong and to persuade the Chinese to let them be. And that was the basis of Deng Xiaoping's phrase, one country, two systems. Actually, he probably designed it originally for Taiwan.

But it clearly applied to Hong Kong. But then the question arose was whether the Chinese actually understood what the Hong Kong system was. Was it just allowing rich Chinese people to become richer? No. It was about a whole framework of freedoms that you and I would take for granted. The rule of law rather than rule by law. The beginnings of democracy.

but never the chance of independence, at least within the existing agreements. So the joint declaration was an attempt to put one country, two systems into a treaty form. And the Chinese Communist Party agreed that it would keep the Hong Kong system as it was, while Hong Kong nevertheless became part of Chinese China in terms of sovereignty.

I think looking back, it may be that we should have spent more time explaining to the Chinese exactly what Hong Kong's system was. I remember after I'd become governor, going up to Beijing to meet my opposite number and saying that what was hugely important to Hong Kong's future was the rule of law. And he said, but we have the rule of law. And I said, no, you have rule by laws.

And he said, well, what's the difference? So I said, I've just been in the British cabinet. I was a minister who was frequently challenged in court over planning decisions and so on. And I never knew whether I was going to win or not, because I was subject to the law, just like the people who were British citizens who voted for me. I think the Chinese thought I was pulling their leg.

How could somebody who'd been a senior cabinet minister responsible for a large chunk of domestic policy in Britain possibly be challenged and overruled in the courts? But that, as you and I know, is what the rule of law actually means. We're all subject to it, from the mightiest to the smallest mouse. And I don't think the Chinese ever fully understood that. But they agreed that...

we'd proceed in that way with Hong Kong's rights and freedoms and a degree of autonomy preserved for 50 years after 1997. And we put that, as you said, into a treaty, which was called the Joint Declaration. And that in turn was transferred into a sort of constitution for Hong Kong called the Basic Law. And to be fair to the Chinese, for a few years,

After 1997, they stuck to it. They resiled from it in some ways. They slowed down the pace of democratization, which they'd promised earlier would be entirely decided by people in Hong Kong. And they interfered more in Hong Kong than they should have done. But by and large, Hong Kong was still the place that had been, recognizably, the place that had been in the first years after 1997-1997.

under Chinese rule. That really all started to change pretty dramatically with Xi Jinping for reasons which we can explore. But I'm not sure that we could ever have imagined that. Milton Friedman and others always argued that one country, two systems was impossible, that it was sort of oxymoronic. But I'm not sure what else we could have done than try to negotiate that and hope that

that the Chinese would be as good as their word. We now know, of course, in one area after another, that the Chinese are spectacularly unreliable. They don't keep their word. You spend ages negotiating with them. It's like, I don't know, it's somebody once talked about being pecked to death by ducks. It endlessly goes on. And at the end of the day, you think, well, they've made such a fuss about negotiating it.

that they're bound to stick to it. And they don't, whether you're talking about issues like trade or whether you're talking about issues today like global health. They flagrantly broke the international health regulations, which is one of the reasons why that pandemic took off so fast and affected so many people.

So we'd seen, you know, over the years, the Communist Party, I mean, since the handover in 97, we'd seen them pecking away at the terms of the joint declaration. It was much more obvious in 2020 when it happened all at once with the Hong Kong national security law. But why was Britain not able to enforce any consequences? Or maybe the question is, why were there no consequences in

in the joint declaration as part of those terms if the CCP were to violate that treaty? That's a very good point. Why wasn't there any arbitral procedure? And I think that was because it was probably at the time, I didn't negotiate it, but I probably thought it impossible to do. And that if the whole thing was enshrined in a treaty at the United Nations, that should be enough to make sure that it was guaranteed

And also, it used to be argued by some people in the UK that since we'd set Hong Kong on a course of democratization, the fact that people would have more say in their own future would itself be a break on China breaking its word. And I don't think, honestly, that we believed that we thought that China would break its word so vehemently and across the board.

And I think one of the reasons why it did so in Hong Kong was pretty clear from the time that Xi Jinping became the dictator in China. Let's not mince words. When he was ascending to the senior post, he instructed the party cadres and the government cadres to engage in his words,

in an intense struggle against... And then they listed all the features of open societies, of democracies, of free societies, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, parliamentary control, and so on. And when you looked at that list, it was a pretty good description of Hong Kong. And the Chinese obviously thought, or Xi Jinping obviously thought, that those...

aspects of freedom represented an existential threat to Chinese communist rule. Now, I'm going to say something now which some people don't believe. I was, until recently, the Chancellor of Oxford University. I was there for 21 years. And quite early in my time, we had a visit from somebody who became head of, under Xi Jinping, of the Hanxi Corruption Commission.

party committee and then eventually vice president. And he was an interesting man and a very, very clever man. He's with Zhu Rongji, I think the cleverest Chinese official I've met. And he'd been mayor in Beijing. And when he was coming through Britain, he was then the vice minister for economic affairs. He was coming through Britain and he'd been organized. He'd had an organized for him trips to the

British Olympic Stadium and he'd seen enough Olympic stadiums to drive him insane, I should think, over the years. And he was taken to the Science Park in Oxford. And then we took him to the Ashmolean, where he was quite cross because the ambassador stopped him going and look at an exhibition we had. The Ashmolean is our main museum of cultural revolution posters.

The ambassador was very nervous about him going to see that. But he was obviously a man of considerable artistic knowledge and tastes. And he wasn't so much interested in the Chinese artefacts. He seemed to be much more interested in the examples of the Italian Renaissance, including a famous painting of a hunting scene, which is always thought to be one of the greatest examples of perspective in early Renaissance paintings.

He went back to look at it two or three times. We then took him off to lunch with a lot of Chinese students and academics. And after a bit of time, his ambassador came over and said, it's time for you to go back to London now, Minister. And he said, I can't go back to London yet. I haven't been to the Bodleian Library, one of the greatest libraries in the world, our main library.

So we got the librarian, who was a very nice American woman called Sarah Thomas, who'd been at Harvard. We got her back from a walk in part of the parkland in Oxford. She'd been walking her dog, and she came back and she showed him all the main Chinese artifacts in the Bodleian. And he was plainly disappointed because he thought that in the Bodleian library there was correspondence

between the great French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and an Oxford academic in the 19th century. Well, there was, but it wasn't in the Bodleian, it was in our college library. Nevertheless, we then from that discovered that he was passionately interested in de Tocqueville, and not because of de Tocqueville's book on democracy in America,

But because of a book that I had to study at university when I did history, a book called The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. It's a wonderful book. Why was he so passionately interested in it? Because de Tocqueville's main conclusions were that even though people in 18th century France were getting better off, it didn't make them easier to govern. Indeed, it made them more difficult to govern in some ways.

And secondly, de Tocqueville's big conclusion was that authoritarian regimes were always at their most vulnerable and their weakest when they tried to reform. And de Tocqueville's book, L'Ancien Régime, certainly sales of it in China spiked. It became best-selling. It was compulsory reading in the party school.

And it obviously greatly affected not just him, and he was at the moderate end of the leadership, but other leaders as well. And I think when Xi Jinping became leader, they started to think that under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin and so on, that Hong Kong, that China wasn't turning into a multi-party democracy, but certainly things were freeing up. There was civil society.

There was civil society which was arguing with the government and government, local government. And there were newspapers which attacked corruption in local government and in government as a whole. And I think they began to worry, the leadership around Xi Jinping, that they were starting to lose control. It was personalized as well because

there was a very charismatic Chinese leader called Bo Xilai who tried to elbow his way into the leadership. And that, I think, spruced the leadership as well. But above all, I think that they began to feel that they were losing control, as I think they would say, east, west, south, and north. They'd been in control of everything before. And I think that's

was reflected in their attitudes to Hong Kong, because Hong Kong was plainly an example of the sort of freedoms which they were terrified by. So it's a long way of tying in Alexis de Tocqueville to the modern Chinese Communist Party.

but i've always been convinced that that really did have an effect on some of the leadership that that perception of how vulnerable authoritarian states could be once they tried to reform oh that's very interesting especially in terms of what's happening today with the economy in china continually facing problems and yet the the decision is greater and greater party centralization and control over the private sector yeah i mean one of the things that people

really should recognize about the Chinese Communist Party is that it seems to be incapable of reforming itself. And we're seeing that in the management of the economy today with falling growth rate and increasing throttling of anything that's private sector, not least in high tech, because it plainly represents a threat to the sort of Leninist economics that Xi Jinping and others believe in.

Going back to Hong Kong, I'm just curious, what was the feeling you had in the city in the lead up to the handover? Because the Sino-British Joint Declaration was made in 1984. You became governor in 1992.

Was it there the sense that this was this impending doom that was coming or that maybe they would stick to it and 50 years later, the Communist Party would have reformed and changed and things would work out? What was the feeling? Well, by and large, there was a degree of optimism, mainly because I think people thought, what the hell is the future? And this were optimistic.

What punctured that a bit was the killings in Tiananmen Square in 1989. I happened to be there because I was at the time, because of the job I had in the British government, I was the vice chairman of the Asia Development Bank. And the Asia Development Bank was having an annual meeting in Beijing

at which the big issue was thought to be the seating of Taiwan for the first time in a board meeting. As it turned out, the big event was the student demonstrations. And you really had a sense that you were living in a revolution, that you were living during an extraordinary period of liberation. It's the most exciting time I've had in my life. I had to leave about three or four days earlier

before the shooting started and the tanks went in. But a friend of mine, who was one of the best journalists I've ever known, wrote for The Observer, and he was a great China scholar. And his description of what happened was stomach-turning. He was standing with a group of students in the square, and they started hearing pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,

And the student next to him said, don't worry, Grandpa. He said to my friend, don't worry, Grandpa. They're using they're not using live rounds. At which point this kid fell into my friend's arms, blood coming out of a hole in the middle of his forehead. And one forgets now how a moment of great optimism was cut down by the

leadership and the People's Liberation Army. And that really did have an effect on Hong Kong and encouraged us to make more generous arrangements for people to leave Hong Kong with British citizenship, which some of them did. My predecessor managed, I think, to calm things down quite a bit because it was still some way to go before 1997. Nevertheless, it did cause

a degree of panic. And one of the challenges I had from '92, '97 was to manage the economy, even though there was this uncertainty about what was going to happen in 1997. And the fact that we got through without a collapse in the stock market, in the exchange rate, in housing policy, the fact that we got through without that was

quite a triumph and indicated the underlying strength of the Hong Kong economy, which had been growing for 25 years. I mean, I've been a lifetime politician, at least until the last few years when I played Oxford, but I'd never before been in a position in government where you could every year cut taxes from already low levels, increase public spending,

and increase the amount of money in the reserve. And that we were able to do for all five years I was in Hong Kong. Because of the public spending increase, the Chinese communists used to call me a socialist. And they were always waiting for things to blow up, and they didn't. The economy was remarkably sound. And that's a tribute to the people who were managing it and a tribute to the entrepreneurial spirit of people in Hong Kong.

and for their sort of intimate understanding of economic realities. So I suppose that was, the Tiananmen was the nearest thing to making people take fright, reminding them of what Chinese communism really was all about. I'm always anxious to distinguish between China and Chinese people and the Communist Party, because the people who work for me in Hong Kong

The best civil servants I've ever had were Chinese patriots, but they didn't believe they had to define their patriotism in terms of their enthusiasm for the Communist Party. And so I've always wanted to say to people, I'm a huge admirer of Chinese people and of China, but I think that the Chinese Communist Party is a disaster.

I'm wondering how you felt when you saw the protests happening in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019, especially 2019 when there were, you know, millions of Hong Kongers marching through the streets. Well, we once had a demonstration when I was governor of Hong Kong and 2,000 people turned up when the unemployment rate went up by above 2%. That was the only demonstration I can remember.

There was a demonstration when I arrived in Hong Kong because there was a strike on Cathay Pacific Airline and a group of air hostesses and others turned up at the gates of Government House in Hong Kong. And people said, well, what are you going to do about it? And I said, I'll go out and talk to them. They said, you can't possibly talk to them. They're on strike. And I said, well, I'm governor. It's part of my job.

But that was the nearest we'd ever come to any sort of demonstration. So the demonstrations in 2019 in particular were pretty mind-blowing. And they had consequences for the Hong Kong diaspora and Hong Kong students, which were very worrying because I didn't feel like I could ever give people the assurances that they wanted. Tell you a story.

And I was taking my dog for a walk in a local park near where I live in London. And I turned a corner. There was a group of young Chinese, about five of them, six young men and women, all probably in their early to mid-twenties. And one of them came up to me, and they called me by my nickname in Hong Kong. Bang Ting Hong, one of them said. So he came over to me and said,

He said, do you remember me? Well, I did that politician's thing of sort of waffling. And he said, you don't do. In fact, he said, we got our photograph taken together when you spoke to four or five hundred Chinese students in Oxford. And you had your photograph taken with me holding a yellow umbrella, which you remember was a symbol, which they had in order to ward off.

the fumes of tear gas. So I waffled a bit at least. And he said, look, he said, I've just finished my DPhil. I've done my dissertation on diabetes and I'm hoping to practice in a hospital. He said, and my two friends and my girlfriend have all just finished their medical degrees. We've all just become doctors. And he said to me,

My girlfriend said to me, if we see Chris Patton, if we see the chancellor of the university, I want to ask him one question. So I said, well, go ahead. And she said, we've all finished our professional qualifications. Should we go back to Hong Kong? And there was no way I waffled. There was no way I could really answer that question. Here were very bright young people, important professional careers ahead of them.

What would I say to my own children? What sort of assurances could I give them? And in the end, I was resorted to the sort of quasi-sentimental, portentous statements about freedom always outlasting tyranny and all that, which is true. But if you're trying to work out whether you're going to be a consultant at a hospital in America or Canada or Britain or go back to Hong Kong,

So I've always had that real sense of concern that I can't give people whom I like inordinately and respect inordinately. I can't give the sort of assurances which I'd love to be able to give because I'd be lying. So I hope one day I'll be able to say that with some optimism. But I'm 80 now and I'm not sure whether I'll live that long. I don't want to sound morbid, but it's just a reality.

So it's been such an important part of my life. Not the most difficult job I've ever had, but certainly the most enjoyable and the one which had most effect on people. I loved Hong Kong. Still love Hong Kong. I can't go there anymore because God wouldn't let me. And I still see quite a lot of members of the Hong Kong diaspora in Britain. There's probably 150,000, pretty much, as I said earlier.

And lovely and enthusiastic and ebullient. And went back to my old school recently. And the new chemistry master was from Hong Kong. I went to speak at my grandson's schools and three teachers came up to me who were all from Hong Kong. And it's sad. I mean, good for Britain. But it's really sad to see the way a pretty brutal society

authoritarian, totalitarian system can crush a free society. And what is also depressing is how some people who were still making money there managed to find excuses or for reasons for not belonging or not believing what's happening. There was a guy who was a friend of mine, he and his wife, who used to describe himself when I was in Hong Kong, very rich lawyer.

He used to call himself the only member of the Labour Party paid up in Hong Kong. In other words, he wanted to be seen to be associated with moderate left-wing causes. He was a tremendous philanthropist, funded the jazz club very good with other artistic endeavours in keeping them going. And we were having lunch, maybe five or six years ago, with them.

him and another friend of mine, Jonathan Dimbleby, who wrote my biography. And he said, Jonathan said to me, why don't you tell him what you think is happening in Hong Kong? So I went through all the ways in which I thought the rule of law was being undermined. He's a lawyer, this guy. And he said, I didn't know about that. Mm-hmm.

And then we quickly changed the conversation to the subject. But five minutes later, he said, I didn't tell you, did I? I've got the most wonderful new boat. And it made you realise that how loud money speaks. Yeah.

You know, there's part of your last diary entry in your book where you talk about, you know, the actual handover ceremony and everything that's going through it. And then you talk about, I was really struck by a part where you're sitting across the table, like with Prince Charles, Prime Minister, and then you have, you know, the Chinese Communist Party officials on the other side and Jiang Zemin, who's the leader of the CCP at the time. And you describe them as clapped out old tyrants.

And then you wonder, why do we allow ourselves to be bullied by these people? I mean, I think that's actually a good question for not just... It's the question for now as well. Yes. Our foreign secretary in Britain has just set off, he's in Beijing already, and the new government is very keen to say this isn't an attempt to reset a reset of relations.

But underlying it is all the old crap, sorry, all the old rubbish about how, you know, you shouldn't say things to the Chinese which will question their own political narrative. And unless you go along with their political narrative, you can't do business and trade. It's all absolute hooey. But it still exists today. I mean...

I was looking up the figures this morning. In the last 20 years, China has had with Britain a huge trade surplus. Today, the Chinese exports to Britain are almost twice the size of Britain's exports to China. And the Chinese investment altogether in Britain is worth about 0.3% of the total.

And there are, I think, something like 9,000 or 7,000 jobs sustained by this. So the idea that they're crucial to our economy and that in order to make sure that they do more to help us economically, you have to kowtow to them is drivel. I mean, I refuse to accept that the Chinese Communist Party in world affairs has the mandate of heaven. What's happening in Ukraine at the moment?

where 60% of Russian weapons or the weapons and technology which sustains the Russians from abroad comes from China. How can we go on with the knowledge that Reuters published the other day? It obviously came from one of the security services that the Russians have established in China, a factory which manufactures high-level drones.

How do we allow ourselves just to look a little concerned about that, but say, well, it's got to be business as usual. What is business in English? Of course, we've got to try to find an arrangement living alongside China. But business as usual? Our main security services, MI5 and MI6, and the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee, have all in the last year

described China as a threat to Britain, as a threat to our national security and a threat to the security of our economy. You know that the investments that China is actually making in Britain are an attempt to buy into high-tech companies or into parts of our infrastructure which could be politicized.

We know that one of the arguments against Chinese electric vehicles is that an electric vehicle is like a mobile computer. And you can find out wherever, where anybody's going. You can tap into phone calls and so on. So we know all those things about China, which is not a reason why we shouldn't try to do business with them. But it's a reason for doing business with our eyes open and for insisting

that we can say what our concerns are. We don't have to cover up our concerns for fear of offending the Chinese. It's absolute rubbish. But it comes on... You go through cycles in politics with people, you know, thinking that we have to kowtow to China and then they become more realistic and they go back to the kowtow mode as well. And I just think it's...

It's sad that there are these delusions which still exist in politics, and they're very largely, of course, encouraged by parts of business and some of the consultants, which was consultancies who have large numbers of Chinese clients, and they want to offend them. You know what it's like. And it's...

A bit dispiriting from time to time and a bit dispiriting from as well when you try to explain what your concerns are about universities. I mean, I am very keen on Hong Kong Chinese and mainland Chinese and Taiwanese Chinese coming to the university that I was chancellor of until recently. I think it's very good, provided that they have the same liberal educational experience that everybody else has.

provided that some of them aren't persuaded by the Chinese embassy, which happens, to become knocks and to tell tales about other students, provided that when you do research collaboration with them, you are certain that it's not in association with the surveillance firms or with firms that are in the military security complex. So...

You know, I'm not against trying to deal with China, but I'm against trying to deal with China on the basis of the fact that you can never criticize, the fact that you can never call them out when they break their agreement, as they did over coronavirus, after having signed up to the international health regulations in 2006.

which committed them to giving timely, transparent advice when there was a new illness, an outbreak of a new illness, assuring the Australians. The then foreign minister is the same guy as his foreign minister today, Wang Yi. He was in Australia assuring the Australians that

Yes, there was an outbroken influenza in Wuhan, but it was manageable and not transmissible. At the same time, the Chinese were buying hand over fist PPE equipment in America, in Australia and so on. When the Australians said they wanted a WHO investigation, the Chinese threatened to cut off all exports from Australia.

Well, it was a threat because they actually needed the barley for beer and they needed the iron ore because it was cheaper than any other. But they get away with that too often. And I don't think it's helpful for them. And I think it's rather demeaning for us. Sorry, that's my dog barking in agreement with me. Get him on the camera.

So moving forward, what can the international community, maybe Britain in particular, can do for Hong Kong, considering the Chinese Communist Party is a bad actor, they don't honor treaties and international agreements? What can actually be done to help the people of Hong Kong? Well, what we've done so far is to give about 150,000, 140,000 passports to come and live here.

And to be honest, that's about it. I mean, we can't send a gunboat in, but we can point out to other people in other countries which purport to believe that the Chinese always keep their word what happened with us and what has happened with the agreements they made with the WTO, agreements they made with the World Health Organization. And one real concern, I think,

is that when you look at climate change, we are going to have to strike international agreements. And the likelihood is that those will involve costs and sacrifices for people. And democracies, not without difficulty, will do that. And then having to explain to their citizens in a democracy how it is that the Chinese are getting away with not doing it. And I think it's a fundamental problem for countries

democracies to deal with that in the future. One of our best judges made this point the other day when talking about how secure democracy was. So anyway, I think we have to be absolutely determined to go on expressing our own values.

being prepared to fight for our own values. But one of the politicians I always most admired was Adlai Stevenson, who did everything right as a politician, except he lost too many elections. And he said, we have not only to fight for our values, but live up to them. And I'm not sure how good we are at the moment in living up to them, but I hope. Anyway, we've got a foreign secretary

Britain at the moment, I'm sure a perfectly nice man who's in China. When he was in opposition, he believed passionately in having an international agreement on whether or not what the Chinese were doing in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs was legally genocide. Anyway, he seemed to have forgiven all that.

Let's end on a positive note. Favorite memory of Hong Kong? I like that. The decency and humor of people. It's wonderful. It's a wonderful harbor, mountains. The countryside is, to people's surprise, dramatic and lovely. But above all, it's the enthusiasm. I mean, people created Hong Kong out of nothing.

It was a harbour and nothing else. And the people who made Hong Kong were refugees. One of the stupidest things that the Chinese Communist Party did when they were screwing Hong Kong and rewriting the curriculum in schools was to say that Hong Kong had never been a colony. It had been occupied territory. What they never noted was

was that, yes, it had been occupied territory, but occupied by refugees from China, who were the very people whose children were having to read these textbooks. Jimmy Lai, now who's been in prison for a thousand days, the newspaper proprietor, Chinese hate him. He'd stowed away from China during the Cultural Revolution, done spectacularly well in a safe haven, a British colony.

Now he's been in prison for a thousand days or more in solitary confinement for 23 hours and 10 minutes a day. He's a Catholic. They don't allow him to have community. Just in another little vengeful twist. It can be very nasty. But I remember the courage and bravery and decency and charm and humor of the people who worked with me and for me. And...

Certainly for me and for my family, the happiest time we've had in our life. So thank you, Hong Kong. And thank you for joining us today. This was an amazing experience to hear. Thank you very much indeed. Nice to talk to you. Wow, after that, I'm having all kinds of memories and feels from our time in Hong Kong. Yeah, and we were not there for five years, you know. Yeah. But I think our time in Hong Kong spanned a very interesting period. Uh-huh.

And we probably inhaled a lot more tear gas than he did. If the only protests he dealt with were some Cafe Pacific flight attendants and 2,000 people, yeah, I think so. 2,000 is less than 2 million, which is what we had in 2019. But the 2 million were not shooting tear gas at us. Yeah.

I was really struck by what he was talking about when he was in Beijing during Tiananmen, during the protest, which really lasted about two months of 1989 in the spring that year. Now, it felt like a revolution. And I feel like when we were in Hong Kong in 2014, it really felt like a revolution. You had students who occupied, it wasn't a square, but it was basically like the main thoroughfare that went through downtown Hong Kong.

And they'd set up like this mini city and we, you know, walked around and we talked to all these people and they had like, you know, food and they had desks for students so they could do their studies while also protesting. And it was just this feeling, right? This feeling of,

there's this bright future ahead. Yeah, well, optimism. And I think a lot of the people in Hong Kong we talked to were discovering a type of civil society that they didn't feel like they'd always had. I think Lord Patton also mentioned this when he said that there was this stereotype that, you know, people just want to make money. So a lot of Hong Kong people felt like they didn't have that civil society until they saw it more visibly with

the 2014 umbrella movement. It was young people being inspired to actually partake in their country. Yeah, I mean, I remember we interviewed lots of teenagers, you know, people in school uniforms, you know,

I also remember the guys in Mong Kok who were like the big brothers of Mong Kok where they just came and they were like, we're just here to protect the students. Oh, yeah. And, yeah, it was... The kids doing homework in the middle of the protests. There was one guy who was a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver who flew home to Hong Kong after the protests started to, you know, help guard against...

you know, the police or whatever. It was an incredible time. I mean, I think it's the same in 2019 in a lot of ways, except 2019 felt even bigger. Because you literally had two million people marching down the street. I don't think I'll ever forget what that felt like to stand on that overpass, right, and watch this. Endless way. Yes, like people kept coming and kept coming.

yelling for Carrie Lam to you know, resign and you know, five demands not one let it was just I don't think it's Yeah, it's unforgettable. Yeah, I mean truly one of if not the biggest single-day protest in in history, I mean, it's just just Yeah, I know some of you're gonna fact check that but it's it's one of the biggest that's for sure Yeah, you know what struck me

Slightly different topic, but what struck me from reading the Hong Kong Diaries Chris Patton's book was that He talks about like there were two a couple things that he tried to do while he was governor that Got a lot of opposition from the Chinese Communist Party. One of them was this complicated like attempt to reform LegCo the Legislative Council so that essentially

It's too complicated to explain, but essentially what we would do is give suddenly millions of Hong Kongers the chance to elect some of the representatives that were selected before by special interest groups.

Hong Kong and then the other thing he did was negotiations to set up the court of final appeal which is like the Hong Kong version of the Supreme Court or something like the your last appeal right and how against both of these things the CCP was and what was interesting though it was like they they called them things like

The Sinner of a Thousand Generations. And there are all these colorful serpents. Whore of the East, I believe. Yes, the tango dancer. That one doesn't seem to fit. I don't know why. Whore of the East, Serpent of a Thousand Years.

Tango dancer. They also called him a socialist, as he pointed out. Yeah, really mixed messages. But what was interesting was that in his diaries, he documents not just having to deal with the opposition from the CCP, but having to deal with the opposition from within the British government. And kind of these...

China experts in the foreign office who were like, oh, well, no, we have to keep our cooperative relationship with China. You can't go ruffling their feathers. You know, we have to be able to still do business like we need to trade with them. And I was just like, this is the same. You know, it's it's like the same arguments that are still being brought up now. Like, oh, no, no, we cannot trade.

confront the CCP about the genocide in Xinjiang or how they are, you know, doing all these crazy carbon emissions or no matter what it is, it's like, okay, we can't, the bullying in the South China Sea, you know. But it has changed a lot. And I think Hong Kong played a role in that. One, just the CCP's open declaration that the Sino-British Joint Declaration denies

Didn't was was worthless as soon as it was handed over. Yeah, basically they're like psych never mind But of course it took them 20 some years to say that right but still the foreign secretary is going over to Beijing to Negotiate whatever yeah, yeah, but I think that's the thing. It's like back then like back in the early 90s maybe you could make some kind of

argument that... I mean, even then it's like right after Tiananmen Square, right? Hey, maybe they'll reform. Right. Well, we talked to someone in 2016 when we were in Hong Kong who said that he believed it was likely that even after 50 years, the CCP would be unlikely to change the one country, two systems because they were going to see how well it continued to do for Hong Kong.

And that turned out to, of course, not be right. But actually for kind of a different reason. Like it's not that the one country, two systems didn't work out for Hong Kong economically. It's that it didn't work out for Beijing politically. Yeah. And I think it was interesting to hear Chris Patton talk about, oh, I don't think they ever understood what the second system was.

In one country, two systems, right? Yeah, like how he was having to explain the difference between rule of law and rule by law and how they couldn't understand that this guy was so high up in the British government, was still subjected to some other authority. Yeah, exactly. Well, in the CCP system, the courts are just there to do what the CCP wants. And I think this has been the real challenge with

many countries many Democratic free countries dealing with dictatorships around the world we tend to just see them as like they must be like us and like we can come to an agreement and Figure out something that works, but they are fundamentally different. They see the world differently They don't see the world in terms of like oh these like all of these people there. They're people just like me Yeah, they're not they're they're they're just schlubs who are underneath you and you are the ruler and

And that is actually how most of human history has been. Right. I mean, it's the difference between a leader who wants power for himself and one who wants to empower his people. And, you know, out of 200 countries or so, there's mainly only like a couple dozen countries where the governments are actively trying to empower their own people. It's just not a very big percentage, unfortunately. Yeah, I think that the...

I just keep thinking of Secretary of State Antony Blinken's speech, his first China speech, where he talks, you know, he calls out the CCP for doing some things. No, he doesn't call out the CCP. He calls out the Chinese government because he won't talk about the Chinese Communist Party. But then he goes on about how if China wants to join the international rule-based order, you know, it's going to have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like the premise is that

To your point does China want to join the international rule is water? No, no, it's they want power and they don't want they don't want to join your system where They have checks and balances. Yeah, they want to set the rules Yeah of the system they want to say what the international order is and force the u.s To follow that and they're doing a pretty good job. Yeah, I mean, I think I think the carbon emissions are such a great example of this because

Like China, the Communist Party, looks at the issue of carbon emissions and global warming, and they see all these countries, these liberal democracies, curtailing their own

fossil fuel usage. - Their industrial capacity. - Yeah, getting rid of their industrial capacity to mitigate the carbon emissions. And the CCP is not like, oh, I want to join this rules-based international order. What do they do? They build more coal plants. They now emit more carbon than the rest of the developed world combined. And they're like, oh, manufacture stuff in China 'cause it's cheaper.

And of course, so many of these liberal democracies are just like happy to do that because somehow it's not

like occurring to them that by getting cheap stuff made in China, it has the same global impact, actually a worse impact. But China's, their only goal here is to take advantage of this thing that liberal democracies consider very important for the future of humanity. And the CCP is just like, future of humanity,

It doesn't even matter. Like, all that matters is that we can use this to our advantage to get more power and money. And in that case, they specifically joined the Paris Climate Accords, right, so that they could manipulate it so that they have an extra 30 years of...

you know, doing whatever they want before they have to start to curb their carbon emissions. Before they start to come up with excuses for why they need a further extension. Yeah, whatever it's going to be, kick the can down the road. But they basically got that

you know, in the agreement. So they can be like, oh yeah, we're abiding by the agreement that gives us this giant loophole that we put in the agreement. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, your point, when that comes up, well, do they honor the Sino-British Joint Declaration? Do they honor this one? No. I mean, I think...

There was some British ambassador to China who, his name currently escapes me, but he was one of the people that negotiated the Sino-British joint declaration. And he said something about how, you know, the CCP may be, you know, thuggish tyrants, but they keep their word. Like once they give their word, they keep their word. And that was... Put in mouth. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know if he's...

He's dead now, but like I was like, I don't know if he just believed that you don't I mean if they convinced him of that And I don't know if he lived long enough to see that that was not in fact the case Yeah, it was what Chris Patton said was very interesting about like the whole negotiation process It's like being pecked to death by ducks like they're putting so much effort into this negotiation Surely they're not just gonna throw it out. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but you also don't know why they are

Doing that you know it's possibly also to Wear you down. Yes, you know there's a there are a lot of other reasons for them to go at it like I'll go at it like that the other thing that really jumped out to me in this interview was Because this is this is a kind of propaganda tactic that's used a lot like Hong Kong was occupied territory You know these evil colonialists

And as he said, well, what was it occupied by refugees escaping China's communist system? Yeah, that was definitely true in the 20th century. Yeah. Right. I mean, I think it's more clear now than it was 25 years ago.

that the legacy of the British system was what ensured it, especially the reforms that Lord Patton had made as governor, that ensured at least a few decades of liberal democracy

In Hong Kong. No, I mean, they weren't really allowed to vote and the CCP kept taking away the... I mean, yeah. Chief executive. Right. Well, yes. Because they were supposed to do that. They were supposed to have that power. I forget when, but it was... I think it was supposed to be... 2007 or 9? No, I think the...

2015 or something like it was no no no originally was earlier than that and then they delayed it you know That was like being able for Hong Kong citizens to directly vote for the chief executive. Yes, and so there was an earlier date sometime between 2000 2010 I think it was closer to the 2010 side of things I forget the exact date they pushed it back and then that was why the Hong Kong the umbrella movement happened is because it was getting up to that other deadline that they set and

And then they were like, okay, yeah, you will, but you get to choose between three people we select. And that was kind of the impetus of the umbrella move of like, no, that doesn't work. And so they were like, okay, we'll keep it to the same system where you just don't get to choose. Yeah. Well, I mean. Negotiation. Negotiation.

Yes, basically. And now, 10 years later, it's substantially worse than simply not getting to choose your chief executive. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's no...

pro-democracy parties anymore in Hong Kong, really. I mean, they're... Anything would have to be very underground. Well, I mean, I think what's happened in the Legislative Council is that there may nominally be some people, but most of the pro-democracy parties have had to disband. And there will never be enough of an opposition to...

actually stop the CCP from doing whatever they want in Hong Kong. Just to interject something real quick, Matt just said something about, you know, like it's a lot clearer now than like 25 years ago. And the first thought in my head is, oh yeah, 25 years ago when they were signing the Sino-British Joint Declaration. Yes, because it is currently what? 2000. That would make it 2009 right now. Wait.

No, he was thinking of the sign of British Droid Declaration, which is 1984. Oh. Chris was thinking 1984 was 25 years ago. I'm still stuck in the early 2000s. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's okay, Chris, because you're only like in your late 20s now. Yeah. My back.

Oh my gosh. But I do appreciate Lord Patton's sort of wisdom of having been through this whole thing from like the 80s through his governorship in the 90s through seeing the last 27 years after the handover. And like he just has this perspective, right? And

You know, one thing that's great about his book, and you pointed this out, Shelley, earlier, is that he doesn't mince words. He's like, you know, he basically says what he believes about the Communist Party. And I wish more people...

in government, especially currently in government, would have the courage to basically just say what they mean. I mean, I don't think he said this while he was governor of Hong Kong. Like, these are his private diaries that he kept and then didn't publish. This is the stuff you wish you could say out loud. Yes. Like, this is, he published it two years ago, so it wasn't like, you know. Hopefully, someday they'll publish my book of thoughts about Matt.

I don't think it's not interesting. If he ever publishes it, don't read it. There's nothing there that's juicy at all. It's nothing but good things. Yeah, that's the kind of book people want to publish. Yes. No controversy whatsoever. Everything is sunshine and, you know. My diaries. I had toast for breakfast. So, yes, I really do recommend reading Chris Patton's The Hong Kong Diaries. They're more interesting than you would think diaries would be.

It's not just I had toast and a cuppa. Yes, that's true. That is not what they talk about. I like your stereotype of all British people. Sometimes stereotypes are based on truth. Yeah, but a lot of British people have bangers and mash. For breakfast? Yes, Chris. Anyway, hey. Thank you for watching. Once again, I'm Chris Chappell. I'm Shelley Chong. And I'm Matt Gnaizda. We'll talk to you next time.