Sir David Akers-jones
Hong Kong chief secretary accused of ‘selling out’ when he became an adviser to Beijing
SIR DAVID AKERSJONES, who has died aged 92, was chief secretary and acting governor of Hong Kong – but was later accused of “betrayal” when he became an adviser to Beijing in the run-up to the colony’s 1997 handover.
Having joined Hong Kong’s civil service in 1957, Akers-jones rose from district officer rank to be secretary for the New Territories from 1973. In that post he played a key role in Governor (Sir Murray, later Lord) Maclehose’s policy of developing new towns such as Sha Tin and Yuen Long, where almost a million citizens – many of them refugees from the mainland, previously housed in grim resettlement camps – were accommodated in cramped but functional high-rise flats.
He also helped execute Maclehose’s reluctant concession to calls for democracy, in the form of universal suffrage for the election of one third of district board members in 1982.
In June 1985 Akers-jones was promoted to the senior post of chief secretary under the governorship of Sir Edward Youde, a former ambassador to China who had been closely involved in negotiation of the Sino-british Joint Declaration (signed in Beijing the previous December) that set the course for 1997. But on another visit to the Chinese capital in late 1986, Youde died of a heart attack at the British Embassy, and the mild-mannered Akers-jones succeeded as acting governor for four months until the appointment of another Foreign Office sinologist, Sir David Wilson (Lord Wilson of Tillyorn).
Akers-jones retired in September 1987 after a spell as adviser to Wilson, but returned to public service as chairman of Hong Kong’s Housing Authority from 1988 to 1993. He regarded the chronic shortage of affordable housing (exacerbated by successive real estate booms) as the territory’s paramount cause of social tension. He might have been best remembered for his efforts to alleviate that problem were it not for the controversy that followed his appointment as the first and best-known British expatriate adviser on Hong Kong affairs to the Communist government in Beijing.
The announcement in March 1993 was reported as “a slap in the face” for Governor Chris Patten (now Lord Patten of Barnes) – of whose proposals for wider democracy Akers-jones had already emerged as a leading critic.
His claim that “I have not lost my patriotism for Britain” was met by “China is welcome to him” from one unnamed high-ranking source, and there were insinuations that he had acted out of pique, having been disappointed not to be confirmed as governor in 1987. A mob of students accused him of “selling out” as he set off for Beijing a few days later.
Akers-jones went on to be one of 400 chosen Hong Kong delegates who met in Beijing in 1996 for the stage-managed “election” of the territory’s first post-handover chief executive, the shipping magnate Tung Cheehwa, and members of a provisional legislative council.
Esteemed in later years as an elder statesman by Hong Kong’s pro-beijing establishment, Akersjones had no regrets for what he saw as his contribution to a smooth transition of power. “I was called a traitor just because I happen to know China,” he observed. “It was absurd, really.”
David Akers Jones (the hyphen was a later addition) was born on April 14 1927, the son of Walter Jones, manager of a brick and tile works in Worthing, and his wife Dorothy, née Akers, a former schoolteacher.
David was educated at Worthing High School and sailed for Bombay in 1945 as a Merchant Navy cadet with the British India Steam Navigation Company, spending four years in Eastern waters before returning to study at Brasenose College, Oxford. After graduation he served in the Malay civil service before moving to Hong Kong.
A fluent Cantonese speaker, Akers-jones had a deep affinity for the people of Hong Kong, especially the native farmers and clan villages of the New Territories, whose interests he championed.
From an early stage he was also well-attuned to mainland sentiment: it was said that his exposition of the Chinese viewpoint during the 1967 riots provoked by Mao’s Cultural Revolution caused the then governor, Sir David Trench, to ask: “Whose side are you on?”
After his controversial 1993 appointment, Akers-jones told a surprised House of Commons foreign affairs committee that “the Chinese style is not to rig elections, but they do like to know the results before they are held.”
In retirement he acquired business interests in Hong Kong and China, and was active in local charities. In 2004 he published a memoir, Feeling the Stones, in which he wrote that he and his wife chose to stay in Hong Kong because “we scarcely know anywhere else.” He said later that “I still feel British,” but things had changed too much in his native land: “The village church where I sang as a boy has locked its doors.”
He concluded: “All endings are difficult,” while declining to offer an opinion as to whether Hong Kong was “better or worse” under Chinese rule. He was appointed CMG in 1978 and was knighted in 1985; in 2002 he received Hong Kong’s own highest honour, the Grand Bauhinia Medal.
He married, in 1957, Jane Spickernell, who was Hong Kong’s chief commissioner of Girl Guides. She died in 2002 and he is survived by their adopted daughter Bryony, their adopted son Simon having died in a car accident in 1981.
Sir David Akers-jones, born April 14 1927, died September 30 2019