Last Exit

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 2 · 22 January 1998

From Patrick Nairne

After referring to the negotiation of the Sino-British agreement, which was published in draft in September 1984, Murray Sayle writes (LRB , 27 November 1997): ‘after it was thrashed out, but before it was signed, the agreement was subject to tragi-comical ‘consultations’, held by a British professor and a Hong Kong Chinese judge in the neutral ambience of the Hong Kong Hilton.’ Sayle goes on to say that one Hong Kong trade union – one of the many unions, guilds, groups and other organisations and bodies which were consulted – had ‘submitted that the question should be put to a referendum. But of course, it was not.’ The passage implies that no serious attempt was made to consult the Hong Kong people. But the facts are different. Since a relatively limited number of Hong Kong citizens were eligible to vote and even fewer of those who were had registered as voters, a referendum was ruled out as an effective way of securing a legitimate reflection of the views of the Hong Kong people. The British Government had, therefore, decided that, once a draft agreement had been reached, special arrangements should be made to test its acceptability in Hong Kong. To this end a body known as the Assessment Office was established in Hong Kong under a Commissioner reporting direct to the Governor. It was recognised that there was unlikely to be any practical scope for amending the draft agreement. The central question was simply: did Hong Kong find the draft agreement acceptable?

The Commissioner’s report of 23 November 1984 made clear the wide publication of the draft agreement in English and Chinese, the extensive range of invitations to comment, the remarkable extent of media coverage and the large numbers of submissions and letters received by the Assessment Office. The report concluded that the response had ‘provided a credible basis on which to make an assessment’ and that ‘most of the people of Hong Kong find the draft agreement acceptable.’

The Government attached great importance to ensuring that the special process of consultation was open and objective – and seen to be so. An independent monitoring team was, therefore, appointed. It was composed of the Hon. Mr Justice Simon Li Fook-Sean, the senior Chinese appeal judge in Hong Kong, and myself, a retired Whitehall permanent secretary and the then Master of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. I am not a professor and my colleague and I never met in the Hilton Hotel (where I alone was accommodated). Our task was to observe all aspects of the work of the Assessment Office and to report independently to the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary on whether we were satisfied that the Commissioner had faithfully followed the prescribed procedures and had ‘properly, accurately and impartially discharged the duties’ of the Assessment Office. We submitted our report on 24 November. We concluded that we were fully satisfied with the way in which the Assessment Office had performed its task; but, at the end of the report, added:

The minority who reject the draft agreement do so either because they can never accept reunification with Communist China or because they are bitter about the consequences for them as British Dependent Territories Citizens. The majority who accept it do so because they regard reunification as inevitable or are relieved that the terms of the draft agreement are as good as they are … The response to the Assessment Office has demonstrated the realism of the people of Hong Kong.

In short, there was nothing ‘comical’ about the tasks of the Assessment Office and the monitoring team, nor about their reports – which were serious, but not ‘tragic’ – in their full and fair assessment of Hong Kong’s reaction to the draft agreement on the future of the Territory.

Patrick Nairne
Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire

From Ian Buruma

Denigrating dissidents is one method – among other, more bloody ones – by which autocrats try to stifle dissent. In his article on Chinese politics Murray Sayle offers his contribution to this exercise. Sayle accuses Chai Ling, and other student leaders of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, of using ‘Maoist’ methods. As evidence he quotes an often quoted interview Chai gave just before the crackdown. She said she hoped for a crackdown, for only bloodshed would awaken the Chinese people. Not a very moderate statement, to be sure. But that was all it was: a statement. Maoist methods would involve real violence. And that is something even this least moderate of student radicals never resorted to. The note of desperation is in any case hardly surprising, when an exhausted, hysterical 20-year-old student is trying to defy a brutal government. Sayle then adds that Chai ‘was long out of harm’s way when her hoped-for butchery finally began’. This is not just sloppy, but malicious. Chai was on the square until the last moment, and in fact pleaded with the protestors to refrain from violence. That Beijing’s official propagandists should wish to discredit rebels against its tyranny is to be expected; that Western journalists should help them to do so is shameful.

Ian Buruma
London NW5

Vol. 20 No. 4 · 19 February 1998

From Jian L. Xiao

The many names which Chinese leaders and officials allegedly gave Chris Patten are by now widely known. In his review of Jonathan Dimbleby’s The Last Governor (LRB, 27 November 1997), Murray Sayle repeated the allegation that Beijing denounced Patten as ‘an eternally unpardonable criminal’ and ‘a triple violator’. These names and others still crop up periodically in the British press. It is unfortunate that few can check the sources and determine for themselves what the Chinese did or did not say. Lu Ping, the former director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, used the phrase qian gu zui ren when warning Patten that his reforms would disrupt the smooth transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong. The British media translated his phrase as ‘the greatest criminal in history’ or ‘a man cursed by a thousand generations’. Lu must have been shocked. Any student of Chinese can testify that qian gu zui ren is a scholarly expression, its usage restricted to statesmen who are deemed to leave negative imprints on the course of history. What Lu said was that if Patten were to go ahead with his reforms future historians would judge him harshly (qian gu = ‘history’; zui ren = ‘guilty figure’). We may disagree with Lu, but we can hardly accuse him of using abusive language.

Then there is the famous ‘prostitute’. The word was wrenched off a newspaper article poking fun at what the writer saw as Patten’s shocking hypocrisy and comparing the Governor’s sanctimonious pronouncements on democratic rights to ‘a monument to chastity erected by a prostitute’. This phrase is a folk idiom which may be translated as ‘a lecture on abstinence given by an alcoholic in the cocktail interval’. No Chinese official ever called Patten a ‘prostitute’ – or, indeed, a ‘jade-faced prostitute’ or ‘son of a thousand whores’ – and the offending word never appeared again in subsequent critical articles. But a different story gained currency in the West. During the Hong Kong handover ceremonies, BBC viewers were told that the Chinese President had called Patten a ‘whore’.

The label ‘thief’ had its origins in a Hong Kong China News Agency article which argued in support of China’s claim that Patten had awarded Jardine two container terminal franchises for non-commercial reasons. China had demanded open tendering for the franchises, which Patten refused: he countered by accusing China of trying to exclude Jardine on political grounds. The HKCNA article suggested that Patten’s counter-accusation was a diversion, an application of the tactic of zei han zhuo zei (‘the thief crying: "Stop, thief!"’). But zei han zhuo zei in the traditional idiom has no more to do with thievery than ‘pie in the sky’ has to do with pastry.

Jian L. Xiao
Oxford

Vol. 20 No. 5 · 5 March 1998

From Murray Sayle

I accept with thanks Dr Jian’s scholarly account (Letters, 19 February) of the true sources in classical Chinese of the mangled epithets reported from Hong Kong during the last days of British rule. Only the first two, however, appeared in my review. Actually, ‘eternally unpardonable criminal’ and ‘triple violator’ seem, on closer reading, to be no more than pithier versions of ‘statesmen who are deemed to leave negative imprints on the course of history’ and ‘guilty figure’. On the more vulgar abuse allegedly showered on Governor Patten, surely it is the BBC’s command of literary Chinese, rather than mine, that is at fault. Now that tempers have cooled somewhat, however, we might all agree that the last governor was clearly not an admirer of the Beijing leadership, and vice versa – but that, on the whole, Hong Kong’s historically inevitable return to Chinese sovereignty seems to be going well, for which all sides deserve much praise.

Murray Sayle
Aikawa, Japan