`FATAL, FATAL, FATAL'

Derek Davies explains why the old Foreign Office China hands are so scathing about the present Governor of Hong Kong SIR JOHN ADDIS, British ambassador to Peking, sinologist and connoisseur of Chi- nese art, threw a drinks party in the spring of 1974 for delegates and journalists in town for an exhibition of British industrial technology. The reception was at his resi- dence; seven years previously, hysterical Red Guards had destroyed the embassy building. The exhibition was one of the first such international get-togethers in Peking in almost a decade, the result of the late Prime Minister Zhou Enlai's efforts to haul China out of the destructive isolation of the Cultural Revolution.

But our host had other matters on his mind. The Museum of the Forbidden City had actually asked his help in dating a piece of early Sung blue-and-white pot- tery. He was tickled pink: it was an induc- tion into a most exclusive club, the supreme accolade to his ambassadorship.

Addis was the archetypal FCO man- darin, fluent in Chinese, academically learned in its culture. Like the 'Camel Corps' of Arabists in the FCO, linked by a shared expertise in Arabic and generally sympathetic attitudes to Arab causes, the mandarins form a club united by more than the years spent in studying a difficult language and its culture. They could be under the spell cast by Cathay ever since the days of Marco Polo and of caravans sweating along the Silk Road.

The mandarins' contemptuous attitude towards those not initiated into the labyrinthine world of sinology was perfectly encapsulated by Lord Wilson, departing last July from the governorship of Hong Kong to make way for Chris Patten. He characterised criticism that he had deferred too much to China and 'disastrously' failed to stand up for Hong Kong's interests as superficial. Most negotiations were con- ducted in private, he said, but some public discussions were unavoidable. 'If the price of that was that some people did not understand what was going on and said this policy was weak, so be it,' he added.

Wilson was expressing in diplomatic terms the sort of abuse since levelled at Chris Patten as a 'bull in a China shop', ignorant of 'Chinese traditions'. What Chi- nese traditions lack, of course, is any expe- rience of representative government or much concern for human rights, which is what his detractors really mean.

Chris Patten is a break with the 20-year- old tradition that the governorship of Hong Kong should be a foreign office sinecure. Their first appointee, Lord MacLehose, has stated that he does not believe Hong Kong's democrats have 'any useful future'. He recently told the House of Lords that, as London and Peking 'had so much in common', it was a pity 'a dispute over elec- toral matters should develop into a con- frontation'. He quoted Zhou Enlai to the Lords: 'Let us set aside differences and concentrate on points in common.'

The FCO mandarins have not only occu- pied Government House. They have func- tioned as successive governors' Political Advisers, made up the senior British con- tingent to the Joint Liaison Group (the Sino-British body implementing the offi- cial policies of 'convergence' with China), and, of course, have staffed the embassy in Peking and the relevant desks within the Foreign Office. Last but not least, sitting across the road in Downing Street has been the somewhat shadowy figure of Sir Percy Cradock, another former ambas- sador to Peking, who until last June was both Mrs Thatcher's and John Major's Special Adviser on Foreign Affairs.

Cradock entertains no illusions about the Peking leadership and was once quot- ed as remarking that 'they were thugs, are thugs and always will be thugs'. But he feels that their thuggery should be deferred to: he it was who advised John Major not to incense Peking by receiving the Dalai Lama. At a City of London din- ner last week for the visiting Chris Patten, he was heard commenting on the Patten reforms. 'Fatal,' he said, 'fatal, fatal.' Lord MacLehose at the same dinner told a jour- nalist that democracy 'was doubtless good for filling a few of your columns'. Democracy was, of course, once promised to Hong Kong by Mrs Thatcher and her Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe as a sop to win acceptance of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future. Governor Wilson took the propos- als to Peking for approval and, when the Chinese objected, they were shelved (in this sense, Patten is proposing nothing new, simply a more modest version of a past public pledge). Howe has U-turned since, and criticised the Patten reforms: one should deal with China 'softly, softly', he said. Ironically, Howe is soon to lead a British delegation on human rights to China. So Peking is bracing itself to be worried by a dead sheep. The issue of human rights was raised, over FCO objections by John Major, who wanted to preserve some face during his trip to Peking last year as the first western leader to visit since Tienanmen. He was there to beg the Chinese to agree to Hong Kong's building a new airport. Accompa- nying Major on his trip, Cradock confided to the press that the raising of the human rights issue was 'just froth', that the airport was the important thing.

The mandarins regard the issue of human rights in China as dismissively as that of democracy in Hong Kong, as a matter raised only by the ignorant. Sir Richard Evans, ambassador to Peking in the mid-1980s, once confided to journal- ists that — 'thank goodness' — he had never been required to raise the issue dur- ing his time there. Sir Robin Maclaren, former Political Adviser, former delegate to the Joint Liaison Group and present ambassador to Peking, has reportedly lamented recent damage to Sino-British relations. In the past, he has complained that London's interest in human rights is `a great bother for the embassy'. Sir Alan Donald (another former Political Adviser and ambassador at the time of the Tienan- men 'incident', as the Chinese call it) took a liking to the unbending strong man Li Peng when he was appointed Premier and shocked visitors from Hong Kong with his upbeat views on the 'stability' of the situa- tion after the massacre.

It is understandable that certain special interest groups are against the reforms: Hong Kong businessmen who wish to make profitable hay while the sun shines; Hong Kong community leaders who are conscious of the source of power and pres- tige after 1997; British Conservative MPs like Sir Edward Heath, Robert Adley and George Walden, whose egos are regularly and expertly stroked when they visit Peking to be hailed as 'friends of China'. This particular trio has aroused much merriment in Hong Kong over the years: the plump Father of the House pontificat- ing about his geriatric Peking pals and

You're the first invisible friends we've ever had.'

splutteringly trying to excuse the Tienan- men massacre (Probably the students ought to have been told to go home before Mr Gorbachev arrived.'); Adley, whose Asian experience appears confined to a stint as a public relations man in Malaysia (Hong Kong's liberals are 'a handful of noisy, outspoken agitators — some of whom have access to British passports [whose] ambition is to undermine the rela- tionship between Britain and China . . . "one country, two systems" means one [his italics] country'); and Walden, who regu- larly pollutes the pages of the Daily Tele- graph (China is set on the 'shamelessly fascistic' line of 'uninhibited supression of human rights', but British must bow to force majeur' and 'tough realities', and anyone who disagrees is a 'wimp' indulging in 'impotent and ultimately immoral self- gratification'.).

It is not difficult to understand why the FCO mandarins work to imbue British policies with their own hard-won sensitivity to Chinese feelings. They regard their main professional function to be the improvement of Sino-British relations and so are tempted to see Hong Kong as an anachronistic piece of colonial grit in the workings of that relationship, an irritant to be disposed of as smoothly as possible. As Mandarin speakers, they also tend to reflect superior northern Chinese attitudes towards the noisy, commercially successful Cantonese. As ever, their stated rationale is the historically elusive, potential market of over one billion people. As ever, they like to forget that Hong Kong currently buys four times as many British goods as does the waking giant.

Hong Kong's real strength is as the source of 65 per cent of China's foreign investments and perhaps 40 per cent of its foreign-exchange earnings; as a supplier of technology and management know-how; and as a catalyst out of all proportion to its size for the surging economic growth now taking place in southern China, to which Deng and the recent Party Congress has given their blessing. The international sup- port Patten's proposals have won, includ- ing that of US President-elect Clinton, has reminded Peking of the Democrat's readi- ness to end the Most Favoured Nation sta- tus for imports from China. Many of Deng's economic hopes are pinned on continued access to the US market.

High Peking officials have threatened nonetheless that Hong Kong faces 'ruin' if the Patten reforms are not cancelled; in other words that Peking would be stupid enough to cut off its economic nose to pre- serve its political face. Sir Percy Cradock and the mandarins intone that to treat such threats as the bluster of a bully would be fatal, fatal, fatal. Fortunately, their views, for once, are not those of the British Government.

Derek Davies is a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.