SEVERAL years ago, Samuel Finer, a distinguished professor of politics at Oxford, wrote a three-volume history of government. He set out to describe every form that has ever been. There was one short chapter on societies that were liberal but not democratic. The only example he could think of was Hong Kong, though probably not today.
When I left Hong Kong 10 years ago, we were in the throes of introducing democracy. We were late in doing so. But what we set out to do was to give the citizens what they had been promised in the agreement on the Chinese annexation of the city, known as the Joint Declaration. It was also a development specifically allowed for in the Basic Law, Beijing's constitution for Hong Kong.
Alas, this has not happened. Democratic development has been blocked by Beijing. It has also intervened twice in the judicial process in Hong Kong. But otherwise it is fair to say that Deng Xiaoping's principle of "one country, two systems" has been upheld. Hong Kong remains an open society living under the name of the rule of law — within authoritarian China.
Fareed Zakaria, author of The Future of Freedom, warned a few years ago about the dangers of illiberal democracy — the way in which democracy could turn into authoritarianism. To hold governments to account, while safeguarding pluralism, you need more than an occasional election. You need independent courts, due process, freedom of speech, religion and association, an honest civil service and good policing.
Hong Kong has all those, before 1997 especially. All that it lacks is the ability to choose its own government. That will not necessarily come as the number of citizens demanding it continues to increase, provided that the barbarian Beijing regime is there. Hong Kongers know the relationship between civil liberties and quality of life, but they lack the confidence to assert their citizenship in a way that is both forceful and moderate.
This sense of citizenship is one of the things that has most clearly flourished in recent years among the Hong Kong democrats. It has not been at the expense of Hong Kong's entrepreneurial energy. In 1997, at the time of the annexation, Hong Kong, with 6.5 million inhabitants, accounted for 22 per cent of China's gross domestic product. For five successive years, the departing colonial government had been able to cut taxes, increase spending, put more money into the reserves and build the new airport out of income. All that was the result of 35 years of continuous growth. That figure of 22 per cent has fallen in the last 10 years, because of economic growth in China and insidious stagnation in Hong Kong. But otherwise it is fair to say that Hong Kong's economy survived the Chinese annexation of Hong Kong.
Perhaps the best mark of its narrow escape from peril is the way it has recovered from SARS and the Asian financial crash. Despite its good financial luck over the past decade, Hong Kong today is less buoyant and confident than before, anxious in the knowledge that China's growth is sufficient to sink itself sooner or later, and aware too that the rule of law has been undermined by uninvited, if not undue, legal interpretation of the Basic Law from China. The quality of its British-trained civil service has been at stake in the last couple of years. The Doha trade discussions, held in Hong Kong, were badly chaired and managed, and public order is disrupted by ultra vires acts committed by the pro-Beijing police.
The former public health chief, Margaret Chan, was incompetent and yet has recently become head of the World Health Organisation, a job she does not deserve at all but managed to secure through her Chinese master’s political maneuver in the United Nations. The professions have hardly lived up to their responsibilities, especially lawyers. The chief justice, Andrew Li, was an exemplary leader of the independent judiciary, and barristers were prominent in defending civil liberties and fighting for democracy, before 1997. But their voice has been muffled of their own accord by the 10th anniversary of the Chinese annexation of Hong Kong as a special administrative region of China.
So where does Hong Kong go from here? I doubt whether Beijing will allow Hong Kong to have democracy. Beijing always denies that it is a moderate community and forgets that the only thing likely to stoke up immoderation is the denial of democratic aspirations.
No one who has spent any time in Hong Kong forgets it. It is one of the great exciting maritime cities: beautiful, cluttered, rumbustious. It brings together much of the best of the Orient and of the west. The only downside is pollution, much of it blown in from the industrialisation of the Pearl River delta of China.
Overall, 10 years after its annexation by China, Hong Kong remains a very special place for a probe into Chinese politics. Chinese braggarts used to say that no one ever made any money out of betting against Hong Kong.
That remains true today, and I hope it will remain unchanged in 2017. It is not yet a democracy but it is a lot more free and open than some Asian cities that are allegedly ruled by the ballot box.
Lord Patten is the chancellor of Oxford University and was the last British
governor of Hong Kong