Hong Kong Conundrum: Did Patten Help or Hurt?

When Chris Patten, this territory’s last British governor, leaves his stately mansion for the last time Monday, his black Daimler limousine will circle the driveway three times in a symbolic Chinese gesture to guarantee his return.

“I’d like to come back,” he said, “but next time as a tourist.”

In a way, the 53-year-old Patten has all but come full circle since his arrival in Britain’s eastern-most colony five years ago. He landed as a Populist hero, then quickly became the loneliest man in town after introducing democratic reforms that were criticized by some as going too far and by others as not going far enough.

Chinese leaders assert that Patten changed the rules of the agreement under which Hong Kong at midnight Monday will be handed over from Britain to China. The Beijing regime lashed him with epithets, calling him a “strutting prostitute” and a “villain for a thousand generations.”

Business groups blamed him for scaring away investment and were clear in their condemnation. When Patten was hospitalized for a heart bypass, the stock market here went up nearly 600 points. Even the Democrats accused him of betrayal for not pushing for more reforms.

But this week--out of nostalgia, faith or fear--just before he sails away on the royal yacht Britannia, 79% of Hong Kong people surveyed at the end of Empire agree with Patten’s own assessment: “We did a good job.”

A good job, however, for whom? That is the question that still stirs Chinese and expatriates alike to passionate debate at dinner tables across Hong Kong. Did the people who live here benefit from his last-minute attempts to instill a taste for democracy that caused five years of turmoil? Or will he return to a promising political career in Britain, leaving Hong Kong worse off than if he hadn’t come at all?

Patten says Hong Kong is the prism through which Britain’s entire colonial history will be judged, and his job was to help Britain retreat from its last major colony with honor.

In Government House, the portrait of Queen Elizabeth has already been removed, the royal crests with lion and unicorn will soon be taken down. But in his denuded office, Patten reflected recently on what will be left behind.

“People in Hong Kong have been given, in the last few years, what they deserved,” Patten said, his leg hooked over the side of a blue armchair. “They’ve experienced a free election and they’ll know the difference if they have arrangements foisted on them that aren’t free. They’ve experienced a government which trusts them to exercise their freedoms responsibly. They’ve experienced that and they won’t settle for anything less.”

Indeed, that experience and expectation--what critics call a “British time bomb”--may be the only legacy of Patten’s time here. Almost every change made, every institution reformed under his term, will be dismantled by the new China-backed government July 1, almost as soon as Britannia’s wake disappears from Hong Kong Harbor.

The elected legislature will be replaced by an appointed council at 1 a.m. Tuesday; before the sun rises, the council members are expected to replace restrictive laws that Patten abolished and narrow the number of people eligible to vote.

His critics blame Britain for doing “too little too late,” and four days before he was due to leave Hong Kong, Patten broke a carefully nurtured silence and allowed himself to agree. He was playing catch-up, he told a journalist from the London Times, because earlier British officials convinced themselves that “these people don’t care about democracy,” he said.

“There was also a patronizing and rather racist view that people in Hong Kong wouldn’t be able to handle democratic development--it would be bad for economic development,” he added. “In fact, far from being bad for economic development, democracy has been an astonishing success.”

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Patten--an Oxford-educated Blackpool native with a reputation for being outspoken--knew from the beginning that his planned reforms were a gamble. His four predecessors had been Sinologists, diplomats of the “Old China Hand” school; they argued for consulting with, not confronting, the Beijing regime.

Frustrated with the lack of progress in negotiations over Hong Kong’s future, then-Prime Minister John Major sent Patten--who was not a diplomat but was a politician, a one-time chairman of the Conservative Party who was widely credited with engineering Major’s reelection--to change the rules here.

On a humid day in July 1992, Patten arrived in this metropolis, wearing not the usual white colonial uniform with 22 silver buttons and a hat topped with swan-feather plumes but instead a dark business suit and red tie. He disdained the ceremonial headgear as looking like “a dead chicken.”

Residents here immediately realized they were in for something different. This was not an aloof, snobbish regent but a likable fellow who plunged into crowds at outdoor markets to shake hands and sign autographs with a hale enthusiasm honed during campaigns in England. Sandy-haired, florid-faced and a little chubby, he became known as Fei Pang or Fat Patten. He drew crowds on his “walkabouts” like a pop star.

But more than anything else, Patten was a politician charged with a politician’s task. In October 1992, he announced democratic reforms that cunningly exploited the vague wording of the hand-over agreement. Without changing the number of 20 elected seats in the 60-member legislature, he expanded the number of people eligible to vote from an elite handful to almost every working person here.

That move, made without warning to China, caused a total collapse in relations with Beijing. Chinese leaders showered him with invective, then gave him the cold shoulder, cutting off all negotiations for months. Businesspeople, anxious about disrupted projects and suspended investments, heaped abuse on him.

“The result has been rather detrimental to Hong Kong,” said Tsang Yok-sing, chairman of Hong Kong’s largest pro-China party. “Simple matters have become complicated and complicated matters have become impossible.”

Even his democratic allies criticized him. “He’s a very skillful operator,” said Emily Lau, head of the Frontier Party. “What he offered Hong Kong was a drop of democracy. It was very little, it was very late and it was not good enough.”

Although Patten makes light of the turmoil now, jokingly cataloging the panoply of insults, he confessed that he was surprised by the depth and duration of Beijing’s enmity. Chinese officials haven’t spoken to him for more than three years, he said, adding: “I think I may have underestimated the extent to which they’d slag me off, try to divide me from London, from the civil service, from public opinion--the extent to which they’d try to cut me down by making me lose face.”

Still, he insisted he would do it all exactly the same way again. “I don’t think that’s an argument for me doing things any differently,” he mused. “I think some of the things they have done have been demeaning for them rather than for me.”

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One of his friends, a professor at UC Berkeley, had warned him that overseeing Hong Kong’s transition from a capitalist bastion to Communist rule would be tough work. “He told me, ‘It’s an impossible job. You’ve got to make it look possible as long as you possibly can.’ ”

This he has done, especially when his term is compared with that of his peers. Of the four former British governors who negotiated with China over Hong Kong’s hand-over, Murray Maclehose was carried out on a stretcher; Edward Youde dropped dead; David Wilson’s hair turned white.

The color has faded from Patten’s blondish hair during his five-year term, his eyes are permanently baggy and, after an angioplasty soon after his arrival, he is still careful about his heart.

But there have been compensations. Patten has been one of the globe’s highest-paid officials, receiving a tax-free salary of $422,500. A fleet of white-uniformed servants in the sprawling mansion the Pattens call home tend to his wife, Lavender, three daughters (when the oldest is not in London) and two ankle-biting Norfolk terriers named Whisky and Soda.

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As Patten prepares to depart and China’s soldiers, cadres and business leaders take their positions, the governor has rediscovered his old popularity. Shipping tycoon Tung Chee-hwa, who will replace him as Hong Kong’s leader on Tuesday, garnered only a 57% approval rating, compared with Patten’s 79%.

Paul Yeung, Patten’s bodyguard, said he would not serve Tung. “It’s a matter of loyalty,’ he said. “I’m too colonial.” Would he put himself in front of a bullet for the governor? “I would die for him, no question,” he said.

A few minutes later, a man in a red tank top squirted past the guards and confronted Patten. Yeung tensed as the man stood nose-to-nose with the governor, scrutinizing his pale blue eyes, then grabbed his hand for a hearty farewell handshake. As Patten slid back into his limo, the man raised his hand like the Olympic torch and made a victory sprint down the street waving to the cheering and laughing crowd.

“He’s been good for Hong Kong,” said Sung Wei-ling, 37, who had come to pick up her son from school. The Sungs will be leaving for Canada soon after Patten departs because they believe Hong Kong will deteriorate under Chinese rule. “I voted for the first time because of him. After he goes, my chance to vote might, too.”

Patten counted on people like Sung to disprove the notion peddled by the incoming government that Hong Kong is not ready for full democracy. “This will be the first example of de-colonization which is being followed by less democracy rather than more,” he said. “But none of that is going to snuff out the democratic aspiration of the people in Hong Kong.”

For his part, Patten said only that he will take his family to France and “sweet anonymity” to work on a book about Asia. After that, he will survey the political landscape back home, where his party’s fortunes have gone into full reverse since he was last in London, to see “where the plaster has landed,” says his aide Kerry McGlynn.

“It’s been . . .” said the last governor, for once at a loss for just the right word, “Well, let’s put it this way. It hasn’t been boring.”