Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Margaret Thatcher’s visit was followed by two years of negotiations between the British Foreign Office and its Chinese counterparts. The conclusion of this diplomacy was the Joint Declaration of 1984, which formed the basis of many disputes between London and Beijing in the years immediately before 1997. The principle underlying the Joint Declaration was that ‘current’ institutions of Hong Kong were to remain unchanged for fifty years, but it gave no definition of what the term ‘current’ actually signified. The Chinese, perhaps understandably, argued that Hong Kong should return to China as it stood in 1984, when the Joint Declaration was signed. The British, in both London and Hong Kong, insisted that Hong Kong could not be frozen in time for thirteen years, and that the term ‘current’ had to reflect developments which might occur after the Declaration had been signed.34 In the context of Hong Kong’s 150-year history as a British colony, the British position seemed disingenuous. The colony had been ruled as a benign autocracy for 150 years. Murray MacLehose, who was still governor as late as 1982, had gently but firmly set himself against widening the democratic process. The fact that Hong Kong had never substantially changed its political or legal institutions was perhaps its most defining characteristic. Even the British constitution itself had changed more since 1841 than had Hong Kong’s method of government. In Britain, there had passed the Second Reform Bill in 1867, the Third Reform Bill in 1884, the extension of the franchise to all adult males in 1918, the granting of votes for women at the same age as men in 1928, even a lowering of the voting age to eighteen in 1967. In contrast, apart from the addition or subtraction of a few seats on the Legislative and Executive Councils, absolutely nothing had changed in Hong Kong, which continued to be an outpost of benign authoritarianism while the world around it had been reshaped. And then, just as the final act unfolded, the British tried to rush through reforms, in order to give the impression that the empire had been about democracy all along. It seemed to the Chinese like a desperate sleight of hand.

  The first elections in Hong Kong’s history took place in 1985, after the Joint Declaration. By any international standards, they were a muted affair, as there was no universal suffrage, but rather a system in which members of district, urban and regional councils and representatives of various professional bodies could participate. There was a member of the Legislative Council who represented the legal profession, another who represented industry, one for medicine and another for architecture.35 This was a corporate view of democracy, more in line with thinking in the Middle Ages; it was a belated start, and more agitation was to come.

  In 1989 the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in Beijing, when hundreds of student demonstrators were killed by the repressive Chinese regime. Tiananmen Square helped distort the debate on Hong Kong because it seemed to justify the concept of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, between Western democracy and Chinese autocracy, which had formed so large a part of Margaret Thatcher’s thinking. Yet, in the context of Hong Kong, the division was a false one. The traditions of British imperial rule were much more akin to Chinese, Confucian concepts of law and order, social hierarchy and deference than to any idea of liberal democracy. Some astute observers had always been aware of the central irony of British rule in Hong Kong, that the British civil servants were even more ‘Chinese’ in their philosophy of government than the Chinese themselves. Hong Kong was described in 1977 as the ‘last remaining place where Chinese people are governed on principles traditional to their civilization’. 36 Tiananmen Square harmed China and obscured the fact that British rule in Hong Kong shared many of the values espoused by Confucius and other authoritarian thinkers in the Chinese tradition, particularly prizing the traditional Confucian ideals of order, hierarchy, stability and continuity.

  Chris Patten, the last principal character in the history of British rule in Hong Kong, was, like Mrs Thatcher, an ideological warrior. Although, in British terms, he had been a centrist figure, he remains passionately committed to liberal political philosophy. In his book, East and West, his personal account of the last days of colonial rule in Hong Kong, he freely quotes De Tocqueville, among other heroes of the liberal tradition. This is admirable, but it is historically inaccurate to project those values on to the British Empire. Patten was made governor of Hong Kong in 1992 as a consolation prize. As the general election strategist for the Conservative Party, he had helped ensure that John Major, his friend and contemporary, was re-elected prime minister, but he himself had lost his seat as MP for Bath. On arrival in Hong Kong, Patten immediately made an impact. He was firm in his conviction that ‘the people of Hong Kong should be consulted, and progress would reflect their wishes’.37

  It was fitting that the last imperial governor of any significance should have been a graduate of Balliol, Oxford, which had produced so many imperial civil servants in the century since Benjamin Jowett, a late nineteenth-century master of the college, had promised to ‘inoculate England with Balliol’. Yet Patten’s philosophy and manner were very different from the calm and considered manner of the Imperial Civil Service. He had a glib turn of phrase, but knew very little about China or diplomacy. He rather perversely thought that his lack of knowledge of Chinese was a good thing, and boasted of having visited Hong Kong ‘three times’ before he became governor.38 He described himself as a ‘democratic politician, through and through’, and this was true. If he had not been voted out by his constituents in Bath, he would never have become governor of Hong Kong, so he owed his career, even more than most politicians, to the decisions of democratic electorates.

  It would be inaccurate to say that Patten was not conscious of Hong Kong’s history. He was one of the first to call the colony’s form of government ‘benign authoritarianism’.39 Immediately after leaving Oxford he had joined Conservative Central Office, where he showed his abilities as an organizer and originator of policy. He ended up as head of the research department there, before being elected to Parliament, at the age of thirty-five, in 1979. He went on to acquire extensive experience in domestic British politics, but spoke no foreign languages, had never lived outside Britain and had no professional training in law; nor had he undergone the usual Balliol grounding in the Classics which, although Greek and Roman civilization had long perished, did at least, its devotees argued, expose the student to a rigorous discipline in the languages and mentality of alien cultures. The cadet in Hong Kong was expected to spend two years in Canton and learn Cantonese. In other colonial jurisdictions, district commissioners were expected to learn some local languages and the rudiments of law. Thus, in many ways, Patten was among the least qualified graduates of Balliol College, Oxford ever to hold high office in the British Empire.

  With his passionate belief in democracy and his dogmatic manner, Patten infuriated the Foreign Office mandarins and members of the Hong Kong business community. As Percy Cradock observed, China was a fact of life: ‘if we wished to serve Hong Kong we had to remain able to talk to Peking’. His realism made fun of the ‘chimerical alternative policy, which would somehow be tougher with Peking and at the same time more beneficial to Hong Kong’.40 Cradock, a former Cambridge law don, who became a diplomat in his early thirties, was of the old school. He believed that the general approach of Foreign Office officials from 1979 to 1992 of trying to accommodate China on the question of Hong Kong could not be ‘seriously faulted’. He recognized that it would have been better if ‘democracy could have been long rooted in Hong Kong’, but democracy had been actively opposed by Grantham, Black and MacLehose, who had collectively ruled Hong Kong for twenty-seven of the thirty-five years between 1945 and 1980.41 Henry Keswick, the hereditary chairman of Jardine Matheson, Hong Kong’s greatest merchant company, had made the same claim before a House of Commons Select Committee in May 1989, a couple of weeks before the Tiananmen Square massacre: ‘the fact is, we have not introduced democracy in Hong Kong, so that Hong Kong [could] choose its own leaders and its own future’.42

  Patten sought to consolidate democrac
y in Hong Kong, which he believed to be a legacy of British imperialism, but which was certainly unhistorical with regard to Hong Kong and much of the imperial past. In this attempt, he managed to antagonize the Chinese on the mainland, as well as the colony’s business community who simply wanted to carry on making money in their ‘merchant city’.43 Having being appointed governor in July 1992, Patten promptly upset the Chinese, in October, by announcing proposals to make the legislative system in Hong Kong more democratic. This not only, in the Chinese view, went against 150 years of British tradition, it also violated the tacit assumption that China would have the ultimate say in Hong Kong’s future, because Patten had failed to inform Beijing in advance of the democratic reforms he announced. Even as late as 1991, the first time elections were properly free and openly contested, forty-two of the sixty members of the Legislative Council were either appointed by the Governor or selected ‘by “election committees” and from the “functional constituencies” which represented powerful professional bodies in the colony’.44 Patten’s attempts to impose greater democracy in Hong Kong, at this eleventh hour of British rule, baffled and surprised the Chinese. Patten saw himself as a champion of democratic rights, but the Foreign Office establishment, typified by Percy Cradock, viewed him as, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a grave threat to Sino-British relations. Cradock was conscious that a Hong Kong without China was inconceivable; whatever happened, Hong Kong would have to be part of China. He believed therefore that ‘it was one thing to be defiant when we in Britain would bear the consequences ourselves’, but to be ‘defiant at the expense of a third party, particularly one to whom we stood in a position of trust, as with Hong Kong, was something very different, an inexcusable self-indulgence’.45

  Patten continued to be defiant. Like any democratic politician, he courted the popularity of the masses and used his skill as a publicist to good effect. He was portrayed in the media as the champion of the little man’s rights against the big bully, China. Yet, as Cradock pointed out, Patten would be leaving Hong Kong in a royal yacht within five years, while the people of Hong Kong would have to live with the consequences of his schoolboy politics. In 1995, by redefining the ‘functional constituencies’, Patten more or less extended the vote in Hong Kong to a full democratic franchise. His friends argued that he had brought democracy to Hong Kong; his detractors thought it was a pointless and futile gesture. In terms of what actually happened, the detractors were proved right. The Legislative Council which was elected under Patten’s governorship was dissolved upon the handover of Hong Kong to China and replaced by a Provisional Legislative Council until elections were held under the old pre-Patten rules in 1998. Patten left Hong Kong as a popular figure; he was energetic and charismatic and had, in his wife and three young attractive daughters, a photogenic family which would be the envy of any Western democratic politician, but, in terms of a legacy, it is difficult to see what he achieved.

  On 15 June 2005, Donald Tsang handed in his nomination form for the post of chief executive of Hong Kong; the form bore the signatures of 674 members of the 800-strong Election Committee. Hong Kong after June 1997 was designated a Special Administrative Region, under the ‘one country, two systems’ concept enshrined in the Joint Declaration of 1984. Tsang’s almost unanimous election revealed the emptiness of the ‘one country, two systems’ slogan. As Hong Kong resumed its status as a benevolent dictatorship, and as China moved towards capitalism with increasing alacrity, it was difficult to see how different the systems actually were. More relevantly to the history of the British Empire, it was difficult to see how different Donald Tsang himself was from the British governors who had preceded him as autocrats of Hong Kong. Tsang was Chinese, whereas the British were all white European men, but, in his manners and style, he was virtually indistinguishable from them. A devout and disciplined Roman Catholic, he had joined the Hong Kong Civil Service in 1967 and had served under British rule for thirty years, during which time he became the first ethnic Chinese to serve as financial secretary of the colony. His outlook was similar to that of John Cowperthwaite, whom he praised as the architect of the ‘colony’s prosperity as an international business centre’. Tsang always wore bow ties, and sent his two sons to English boarding schools.46 He was pleased to receive a knighthood in recognition of his services to the British Crown, and he was not embarrassed to use Government House as his residence despite its Southern plantation style. Hong Kong in the first decade of the twenty-first century had simply continued its life as a colony, with Beijing as its master in the place of London. The ‘new cadres’, one observer noted, ‘coming down from [China’s capital] are reminiscent of the early British administrators in the 1800s, with their own language, their own clubs, and their own condescending attitudes towards their new subjects’.47

  Hong Kong’s history goes to the heart of the nature of the British Empire. Its reversion to China under a regime of ‘benign authoritarianism’, the term Chris Patten used to describe British rule, shows a remarkable continuity. Hierarchy, deference, government by elite administrators, united by education in the same institutions, in largely the same subjects, were all features of British imperial rule which were also characteristic of officials in imperial China. The story of Hong Kong also confirms the enormous power wielded by colonial governors. If Sir Mark Young had been succeeded by administrators who shared his vision, the history of Hong Kong might well have been very different. Lastly, Hong Kong showed, in many ways, how changes in Britain were not reflected by changes in the wider empire. Patten was a child of the liberal 1960s and blindly believed a version of his country’s history that presented the British Empire as an enlightened liberal force, spreading democracy and freedom to the furthest shores of the earth. Margaret Thatcher had grown up through the Second World War, listening to, and believing, Churchill’s late Victorian rhetoric that invoked Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’ imagery; she genuinely shared the Whiggish notion that British history, with its Magna Carta and Glorious Revolution, was the story of the development of ‘freedom’ and liberal democratic ideas of government. So far as this idea was true for Britain, it did not apply to any real extent to the administration of the British Empire, which was always a wholly different political organization from Britain itself. The British Empire had nothing to do with liberal democracy, and, particularly in Hong Kong, was administered along lines much closer to the ideals of Confucius than to the vivid, impassioned rhetoric of Sir Winston Churchill, or even Shakespeare.

  Conclusion

  When Benjamin Disraeli, by then Earl of Beaconsfield, wound up the debate on the Congress of Berlin in the House of Lords on 18 July 1878, he made his final appeal to ‘the consciousness that in the Eastern nations there is confidence in this country, and that, while they know we can enforce our policy, at the same time they know that our Empire is an Empire of liberty, of truth, and of justice’.1

  It is revealing that Disraeli said nothing about democracy or liberal economics. Subsequent generations of politicians, historians and campaigners have made the British Empire in their own image, promoting it as a vehicle for whatever cause they happened to espouse. One example of different people appropriating the empire for their own purposes occurs in the field of economic theory. For old-fashioned economic liberals like Winston Churchill, the British Empire was an empire of free trade; for Joseph Chamberlain, on the other hand, the empire was perfect for protectionism, known as ‘imperial preference’, in that goods from the British colonies were ‘preferred’, more lightly taxed, in comparison with goods from Britain’s industrial competitors, such as Germany and the United States. The empire has been invoked to support a multitude of causes.

  Perhaps the key to understanding the British Empire is the idea of natural hierarchy. Class and status were absolutely integral to the empire, and notions of class were important in forming alliances with local elites, the chiefs, the petty kings and maharajas who crowded the colonial empire. The dominance of ideas of class and status mad
e it easy for the British to establish local chiefs as hereditary rulers. In Kashmir, a Hindu family were established as rulers over an overwhelmingly Muslim kingdom. The Dogras ruled Kashmir for a hundred years, and the effects of their rule are still felt today. In Iraq, a new monarchy was established in 1921 under the Hashemite family, who had no historic links to the country. Once again, notions of royalty and status prompted policy without regard to local opinion. The French in Syria were more pragmatic; they established not a monarchy but a series of states which would form the Republic of Syria in 1930. Monarchy was a particularly British instrument of policy. The British established a monarchy in Jordan and supported the monarchy in Egypt. The French by contrast, under the Third Republic, were less enthusiastic about that form of government, and they had actually deposed Faisal, Iraq’s future king, as King of Syria in 1920. It was the British who compensated Faisal by making him King of Iraq, and yet the events of the summer of 1958, only thirty-seven years after Faisal I’s coronation, revealed the imprudence of the British policy. The unpopular monarchy was overthrown in Iraq and led to the establishment of governments in that country which were successively nationalist regimes that often ranged themselves against Western interests.

  The so-called natural leaders, the maharajas, the sultans and nawabs, even the local chiefs, were flattered and cultivated. Individual rulers were set up in the Middle East, in India and in Africa. The irony of this generally pro-monarchical policy was that it was not consistent. A centuries-old monarchy in Burma was torn down by an abrupt change of policy, while monarchies were set up in Kashmir and Iraq which had no real tradition of independent monarchy. Behind monarchy lay ideas of class, which made aristocracies and natural leaders a favourite theme of Colonial Office civil servants, governors and chief secretaries. Natural leaders were explicitly an integral part of Lord Lugard’s policy of indirect rule, a policy which prevailed in large parts of the Indian subcontinent, where a third of the Indian Empire was formed by the princely states.