The Hong Kong Diaries

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As Chairman of the BBC Trust, Patten joined the Prince of Wales and other members of the royal family in the royal box for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert. Even then, Patten’s reforms were carefully calculated to pass through the colony’s executive and legislative institutions. Patten grew up in an Irish Catholic family in west London, the son of an unsuccessful music publisher whose forebears had come to England from County Roscommon, Ireland. In February 2010, Patten was appointed President of Medical Aid for Palestinians, but he stepped down in June 2011.

We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work.Lu] complained that Beijing had not been properly consulted, that he [Lu] and his colleagues were not being given any face, that we [Chinese] were bouncing them with these proposals, that they [British] were out of step with the Basic Law.

In June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not (as other British colonies over the decades) for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. As party chairman, he was widely considered to be the main architect of the somewhat unexpected Conservative victory at the 1992 general election. Events of the last decade, not just in China, have shown how the liberal idea that market freedom goes hand in hand with political freedom has been disproved.Chris Patten’s appointment as Hong Kong’s last governor in 1992 marked a cultural change for the colony. He was appointed Secretary of State for the Environment by Margaret Thatcher in 1989 as part of her third ministry, becoming responsible for implementation of the unpopular poll tax. The trade and investment statistics he cites from the final decades of British rule do indeed suggest there is little correlation between grovelling and real rewards for business. Suffering from starvation and political turmoil, many fled from mainland China to Hong Kong, and in doing so, brought aspects of traditional Chinese culture to Hong Kong.