Patten and DP conduct anti-HK provocations

ast governor” Chris Patten, despite his age and the fact he is in retirement, never missed an opportunity to badmouth the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the People’s Republic of China. His latest outburst took place when he appeared recently before the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee meeting. He essentially claimed the “one country, two systems” has not been functioning as designed after Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997.

But are the people of Hong Kong living better or worse after 1997? Just look at the local economy. In 1997, Hong Kong’s GDP was $176 billion. In 2017, 20 years after the return of Chinese sovereignty, it has ballooned to $340 billion. If we compare the two sovereign states, in 1997, China’s GDP was only 60 percent that of Britain, but now China’s GDP is six times that of Britain’s. So is Hong Kong better off before or after its return to China? The answer is obvious. Hence we can simply brush off Patten’s remarks as sour grapes!

However, we should not ignore the implications of Patten’s action as related to two recent news reports.

The first concerns the recent release of the British government’s declassified document revealing how Sir David Wilson was forced to retire as Hong Kong governor in 1992, and replaced abruptly by Chris Patten. It should be noted that the career diplomat enjoyed a cordial relationship with China. Had he remained at his post, the political changeover would have been much smoother and without the rancor provoked by Patten. But apparently this was not what Britain wanted, so they appointed a politician who had just lost an election as a salve and reward for supporting the then prime minister John Major. He proceeded to take a wrecking ball to what was then a good Beijing-London working relationship under the pretext of advancing his noble-sounding democratic agenda. It is interesting to note that there were strong local objections to this leadership change at such a sensitive juncture. Lydia Dunn, then convenor of the Executive Council, raised the matter with then British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd to no effect. This showed how little weight the British government attaches to Hong Kong people’s sentiment. It was the commencement of Britain’s anti-Hong Kong rhetoric which continued to this day despite The author is an adjunct professor of HKU SPACE and council member of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies. the fact that the SAR now enjoy much more democratic practices, including direct elections, that were undreamed of under British rule.

Patten, for his part, seemed to relish sabotaging all Chinese attempts at a smooth transition. And he carried on his hostility toward China even after the handover like a wolf howling in the wilderness. But Patten fits in with the British political establishment by playing its hatchet man as he takes the HKSAR and central governments to task with little or no justification. He is in his element with his scathing comments on the evolving democratization process in Hong Kong.

The second news is the recent announcement by the Democratic Party (DP) that they have set up an International Affairs Committee to be headed by their former chairwoman and ex-legislator Emily Lau Wai-hing, with a view to liaising with foreign governments on the affairs of HKSAR. This is a very dangerous move by the DP as it will be viewed by the central government as signaling their intention to conspire with foreign powers to cause conflicts in HKSAR and to oppose China. This was exactly what the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping warned what HKSAR should not do — that Hong Kong must not allow itself to be used as a base to subvert China!

The DP already has a bad track record; their founding Chairman Martin Lee Chu-ming having visited US and other Western countries numerous times to badmouth HKSAR and China. Its party members achieved a new low in their relentless efforts to cause civil and political disruption when he and Lam Cheuk-ting jointly appeared in a press conference to support their fellow veteran party member Howard Lam’s claim that he had been abducted and tortured by mainland agents. Howard Lam has since been charged with making a false report to police despite his display of self-inflicted wounds on his legs by a stapler at the conference. The extreme actions DP members and some of their supporters would take to discredit China is mindboggling. And they all seemed to look up to Patten as their mentor and guiding light in all this.

Indeed, anyone who understands the real Hong Kong situation would quickly realize Patten’s remarks at the parliamentary committee are nothing but grossly exaggerated bogus claims of human rights abuses, such as the allegation that “pro-democracy” activists were unfairly imprisoned. The fact that these violent activists were convicted in court under due process for committing rioting offenses was conveniently ignored. Patten even described some pro-independence activists as “extraordinarily moderate” despite evidence to the contrary as many security guards and police officers received wounds due to their violent behavior. Some of them behaved just like street thugs and vandals, causing both injuries and property damage. This should not surprise Patten as he was once in charge of Northern Ireland affairs and witnessed how independence movements could easily degenerated to bloody street violence.

But smooth-talking Patten may have been fed fake information by his Hong Kong admirers. Perhaps Emily Lau should come forward to clarify to the public whether it was she or her committee who had provided him with the provocative fake information to blacken Hong Kong’s law enforcers and judicial process.

What the DP has been doing is clearly not in the best interest of Hong Kong and what we should do is to make a concerted effort to vote all DP candidates out in the next Legislative Council and district council elections!

It is also high time for HKSAR to legislate according to Article 23 of the Basic Law to protect our national security and criminalize any local attempts at conspiring with foreign power to destabilize Hong Kong and stop in their tracks any local movement toward independence.