Chris Patten

Christopher Patten.

Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC (born 12 May 1944) is a British politician who was the 28th and last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 and Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992. He was made a life peer in 2005 and has been Chancellor of the University of Oxford since 2003.

Quotes

• [M]y anxiety is not that this community's autonomy would be usurped by Peking, but that it could be given away bit by bit by some people in Hong Kong.
  • Speech of Policy Address, Legislative Council of Hong Kong, 2 October 1996.

• As governor, I experienced the vitality of life in a booming and free Asian city, saw routinely the best and worst aspects of human nature, and was made to revisit some of the principles in which I have always believed but to which I had rarely given much thought previously. In the darker hours of occasionally fretful nights I found myself face to face with the moral dimensions of political action to a greater extent than ever before.
  • East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, p. 3

• [About Hong Kong:] No other place has quite the same blend of East and West, ancient and modern, spectacular and humdrum.
  • East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, p. 19

• It is not unusual for electorates to want contradictory things, and politicians often make promises accordingly.
  • East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, p. 45

• Nevertheless, it is true that on 1 July 1997 Hong Kong became the only example of decolonization deliberately accompanied by less democracy and a weaker protection of civil liberties. This was a cause for profound regret, especially for the departing colonial power. But it was China's doing and China's decision. I am pleased that Britain narrowly avoided complicity in the dishonourable act of denying the citizens of free Hong Kong what they had been promised in 1984.
  • East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, p. 83

• Asians [...] put more emphasis on order, stability, hierarchy, family and self-discipline than Westerners do.
  • East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom and the Future, Pan Books, second edition, 1999, p. 150
• [Democracy] is obviously an issue which is hugely important to a new generation [of Hong Kong people].
  • Hong Kong twenty years after the handover South China Morning Post (24 June 2017)

• You know perfectly well there have been attacks on the rule of law, on the independence of the judiciary; abductions around Hong Kong streets; suggestions that Hong Kong’s autonomy needs to be curtailed in the future; suggestions that the autonomy of Hong Kong’s tremendous universities is something that has to be looked at again; there is a sense that free speech is under threat.
  • Hong Kong twenty years after the handover South China Morning Post (24 June 2017)

• “Xi Jinping and his court have regarded Hong Kong and Hong Kong’s freedoms as an existential problem for them because Hong Kong represents so much of what they dislike.”
  • addressing the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong (May 2020)

• It matters to everyone of us that the press tell it as it is, not as the government wants us to hear.
  • Chris Patten, addressing the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong (May 2020)

• While we were allegedly taking part in a golden age of China, the head of the Chinese Communist Party was instructing party officials and government officials to engage in an intense struggle against all the things that we and other liberal democracies stand for: Rule of law, parliamentary democracy, universally valid human rights, historical inquiry, all those sorts of things.
  • "China once declared the UK its 'best friend in the West'. But Hong Kong and the treatment of Uyghurs changed everything", ABC News, Australia (June 2021)

• [Nigel Farage] offers nothing for a healthy Conservative future. His saloon bar bluster, if translated into policy, would give us Liz Truss economics, Jeremy Corbyn foreign policy (which would be much loved by Putin) and an approach to our nation's identity akin to that of Tommy Robinson (albeit Tommy Robinson with a cravat).
  • "My six-point plan to drag the Tories back from the abyss", The Independent (15 July 2024)
  • Published following the 2024 general election. A working relationship with Farage's Reform UK was favoured by some leading Conservatives at this time.

About Patten

• "whore", "sinner for a thousand years"
  • Lu Ping, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office (HKMAO) 1990–1997, for introducing democratic reforms in Hong Kong.