One Billion Customers - James McGregor [12]
As a result, foreign businesspeople must be politically active in China and at home. Politics in China is a feudal and brutal contact sport. This is true within China’s leadership circles and ministries, but it is sometimes most evident when China deals with foreigners who have the temerity to challenge the Middle Kingdom. Just ask Chris Patten.
The Uncomfortable Monk
The onetime chairman of Britain’s Conservative party, Chris Patten was the last British governor of Hong Kong before the colony was handed back to Chinese rule in 1997. Soon after his appointment, Patten proposed stretching the Sino-British handover agreement and dramatically expanding the democratically elected seats in the final prehandover Hong Kong legislative council elections. The Chinese government reacted with explosive personal invective, labeling Patten an “eternally unpardonable criminal” and “jade-faced whore,” and describing his actions as “a monument to chastity erected by a prostitute.” China rallied Hong Kong’s pliant business community to attack Patten. Chinese diplomats stirred up British China hands who assailed the proposal as a publicity stunt to revive Patten’s political career at home.
Several months after the pummeling began, Patten summoned me to Government House for cocktails. He wanted to talk to me because he was looking for viewpoints outside his foreign office advisers. Sitting in the sunroom of the white-columned governor’s mansion overlooking Hong Kong harbor, the witty and articulate Patten was jovial but his slumped shoulders and the dark circles around his eyes bespoke weariness.
Cool drink in hand, he leaned toward me. “I want to have a civilized and reasonable discussion with the Chinese,” he said. “How can I do that when they talk like we are engaged in a fistfight?”
I told him the fistfight would end only if he threw in the towel. Patten said he believed that increased democracy in Hong Kong would help protect the island’s citizens against the machinations of their new authoritarian masters. I said that China viewed his proposal as a cynical attempt by Britain to destabilize Hong Kong as Britain walked out the door. My advice to Patten was to act like an elected official himself, engage the citizens in a serious dialogue, wander the markets, kiss the babies, and set a standard that China’s appointed Hong Kong leader would have to follow.
When I returned home to Beijing a couple of days later, a Chinese tourism magazine featuring super-strength stunts by the famous Shaolin Temple kung-fu monks was sitting on my desk. One full-page photograph was of a monk crouching naked atop two granite blocks, rear to the camera, with a third granite block the size of two car batteries dangling by a thick rope tied around his testicles.
I mailed the photo to Patten with a note that read: “I have found a guy in a worse position than you.”
To make sure that they didn’t end up like Patten and the Uncomfortable Monk, Hong Kong’s elite abandoned Patten and engaged in traditional Chinese politics: shamelessly sucking up to the powers in Beijing. China appointed a decent but hopelessly indecisive shipping tycoon, C. H. Tung, to lead Hong Kong after the handover. Surrounding himself with other tycoons as advisers, Tung shaped a government that was of, for, and by the billionaires. The place ran like a country club. When government reforms were being considered, or some government entity or function was being privatized, the policies were generated by committees made up of the sons and daughters of billionaires, which ensured any opportunities that arose would be theirs. Governing Hong Kong under the thumb of Beijing is, of course, a difficult task. But instead of advocating artful policies that accomplish China’s goals while as much as possible preserving Hong Kong’s interests, Tung and the tycoons practiced what I call “preemptive capitulation”: making kowtowing policies based on what they assume China is thinking. Deeply unpopular both in Beijing and Hong Kong, Tung resigned “for health reasons” in March