Patten is Hong Kong’s 28th British governor and probably its last. His immediate predecessors were Foreign Office mandarins, cautious civil servants who took pains not to annoy Beijing. Patten, 48, is unapologetically a politician. Formerly an M.P. and head of the Conservative Party, he has had only two years of foreign experience, as parliamentary under secretary for Northern Ireland. He was the principal architect of Prime Minister John Major’s come-from-behind electoral victory last April, but in the process Patten lost his own seat in Bath. Major sent him to Hong Kong.
By Western standards, Patten’s plans for the 6 million people of Hong Kong are quite modest. He wants to drop the voting age from 21 to 18 and give the public a bit more of a voice in choosing the 1995 legislature. He insists that his proposals were born in street markets and meeting halls, where he has been campaigning like a ward boss since taking office last July. Beijing fears that Patten is allowing a deadly virus to spread. Since the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, China has tried to lock out Western political ideas even as it seeks Western trade and market reforms. “Hong Kong is our window on the world,” says a Beijing economist. “But it’s also the government’s front line against Westernization.”
Patten replies that Hong Kong has joined the list of Asian countries in which prosperity has created legitimate demands for power-sharing. “For me to spend the next five years resisting every pressure from people in Hong Kong for a rather larger share in their own government would run the risk of producing exactly the sort of turmoil that we all want to avoid,” he told NEWSWEEK.
After he announced his plan last month, Patten hit the streets to publicize it, holding meetings, declaiming in the press and turning up on television almost nightly-taking his case to the people like an American presidential candidate. That style used to be unheard of in a British governor, but he claims it suits the times. “Public policymaking produces better results when those results have to be explained to people,” he says. His supporters admire his willingness to take on Beijing. “You have to stand up to the Chinese at some point or they will walk all over you,” says the head of a major Hong Kong firm. “Patten is relentlessly reasonable, but he has put them off balance.”
He also has offended them. Chinese officials are still fuming over the governor’s toast to the People’s Republic at the Oct. 1 National Day festivities in Hong Kong; Patten didn’t bother to mingle and failed to clink glasses with Beijing’s top representative. “That’s the first time in history a Hong Kong governor has been so rude,” says a Chinese editor. Patten’s glib dismissal of China’s criticisms as “background music” only increases the irritation’ “Things like sarcasm don’t go over well with Chinese officials,” says University of Michigan Sinologist Kenneth Lieberthal.
As his admirers see it, Patten has artfully interpreted Britain’s agreements with China on the hand-over of the colony. Singapore’s crafty Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew says Patten has been “very imaginative about increasing the depth of democracy–very ingenious.” China thinks the governor has pulled a double cross. The dispute centers on Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. Beijing has agreed that 20 of its 60 seats can be filled by direct elections in 1995. Now Patten suggests that directly elected local officials make up the committee that is to choose 10 additional members. And he wants to broaden the base of the “functional constituencies”-including businessmen, teachers and other groups-that are to fill the remaining 30 seats. The result: all 2.7 million working people in Hong Kong will effectively have a vote.
His plan is popular in Hong Kong. Three weeks after he announced it, 59 percent of the people surveyed by one newspaper said Hong Kong should press ahead with the reforms, even if China objected. In a more unusual telephone survey, conducted by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post across the border in the mainland cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, 56 percent of those who responded favored Patten’s reforms. Almost 97 percent of the Chinese citizens said they knew of Patten, while only 67 percent had heard of their own provincial governor.
China helped Patten boost his name recognition with its shrill personal attacks. Beijing also exerted intense private pressure. A source in the Legislative Council says all 60 members were approached by Chinese agents and told that if they voted for Patten’s proposals, they would lose their posts in 1997. Beijing also pressured the thousands of Hong Kong businesses that trade with the mainland. “The calls have been going out reminding people that although Patten may be gone in 1997, they will have to stay,” says a former Chinese official who now lives in Hong Kong.
Beijing’s campaign paid off when the influential Business and Professionals Federation came out against the reforms. “To run the risk of developing a political structure which will be dismantled in four and a half years’ time is just not acceptable to us,” said Vincent Lo, chairman of the group. Beijing wants Hong Kong’s magic economy to keep on performing while political passions are dampened. “The party leaders know that democratic steps need to be taken in Hong Kong,” says the former Chinese official. “But they want to be in charge of those steps.” Beijing also knows that many Hong Kong Chinese do not want all-out democracy. “The Chinese people don’t like politicians,” says the chairman of a major holding company. “Whatever party wins, its attitude is always, ‘I got 51 percent–I’m God’.”
Patten insists that his reform ideas were not “brought with me but made here and created out of the dialogue I had with community leaders and political leaders. I suspect that’s why they are still getting very strong support in the public-opinion polls, whatever the criticisms.” He says Chinese can feel proud of their own culture and still “take a rather strong view about wanting to pull more of the levers in their own lives.”
Rather than link Hong Kong’s future to the stagnant socialist regime in Beijing, Patten wants the colony to develop its own new brand of democracy. After hours of emotional debate last week, the Legislative Council voted its general approval of his reforms by a vote of 32 to 21. The key votes on adopting his proposals may not come until March, and China will keep on exerting pressure, at least for compromises. But Patten argues that Hong Kong’s jittery days are behind it and that the colony will be able to debate its future calmly and soberly. He may be right. Since he unveiled his reforms early last month, through all the thunder from Beijing, Hong Kong’s stock market-the most reliable measure of civic order in town-has kept on climbing.
