According to the gospels, “hate begets hate”, something history confirms. Whereas some politicians deploy hatred as their stock in trade, those with judgment shun it. As Martin Luther King Jr, the human rights activist, once explained, “Along the way of life, someone must have enough sense and morality to cut off the chain of hate.”
That “someone”, however, will not be the former governor, Chris Patten, whose animosity toward China and its leaders is congenital. This, of course, was why, shortly after its creation in 2017, he was made a patron of Hong Kong Watch, the London-based anti-China propaganda outfit operated by the serial fantasist Benedict Rogers. Eager to repay Rogers, Patten stoked up opposition to the city’s fugitive surrender proposals in 2019, and traduced its leaders to anybody who would listen. Once violence erupted, he sought to whitewash those responsible and belittle the Police Force that was defending the city, and even vilified the National Security Law for Hong Kong that finally brought the mayhem to an end in 2020.
On May 28, 2020, Rogers must have been ecstatic when Patten, displaying his true colors, declared that “China is an enemy to us now”. This, of course, was precisely the sort of belligerence Rogers and his network wanted to hear, and it raised the temperature. Indeed, sentiments like this play directly into the agendas of those seeking to provoke the type of conflict with China they have already provoked with Russia, and, once again, it highlighted the value to the warmongers of useful idiots like Patten.
On May 25, 2022, moreover, writing in Project Syndicate, Patten, behaving for all the world like a deranged gunslinger, opened fire in all directions. He even targeted the Vatican, which was extraordinary for somebody who holds himself out as a son of the church. Once again, he trotted out the hoary old myth about the fugitive surrender proposals being intended “to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China”, which reprised his 2019 tactic, when his scare stories alarmed local people, with some even taking to the streets. At no point has he been troubled by the knowledge that the government’s proposals, far from being China-centric, were designed to facilitate, subject to court oversight, the surrender of criminal fugitives to the 177 jurisdictions around the world with which Hong Kong has no surrender agreements, thereby buttressing criminal justice at the global level.
With that off his chest, Patten then turned on the chief executive-designate, John Lee Ka-chiu, claiming that he had been elected in “a farcical election process dressed up as democracy”, which was hypocrisy incarnate. Whereas Lee was chosen by an Election Committee of almost 1,500 people representing numerous sectors in society, he, Patten, was not elected by anybody when he became governor in 1992. Instead, he was simply appointed by the then-UK prime minister, John Major, whose crony he was, which was extraordinary.
Even though Patten had been ignominiously kicked out of Parliament by the Bath constituency in the general election, he was nonetheless imposed by Major on Hong Kong, whose people were not consulted on the appointment, let alone allowed to vote on it. And, notwithstanding having been booted out in Bath, Patten is, once again, a legislator now, with a seat in Parliament’s “upper house”, the House of Lords, but not through election. He was appointed to this position in 2005 by the then-prime minister, Tony Blair, and there is absolutely nothing the voters can do to get rid of him. Under the UK’s anachronistic patronage system, he is now a legislator for life, wholly unaccountable to anybody, yet he still has the bare-faced effrontery to lecture Hong Kong on its democratic processes.
As if this was not crass enough, Patten then claimed that Lee had “got the job because he supervised the brutal 2019 crackdown on demonstrations in Hong Kong”, and that his methods “brought shame on Hong Kong’s Police Force, which can no longer be called Asia’s finest”. Such slurs, however, lifted as they were straight out of the Hong Kong Watch propaganda manual, bear no relation to reality, as anybody who lived through the insurrection can testify. Although the protest movement and its armed wing sought, by using violence and destruction, to wreck the “one country, two systems” policy, hoping thereby to provoke a military intervention by Beijing, they signally failed, thanks, in large part, to Lee. Hence Patten’s bitterness now, and that of Hong Kong Watch.
As secretary for security, Lee showed his commitment to maintaining Hong Kong’s capitalist system and way of life, and to ensuring that the rule of law was not subverted by those who, like Patten, wished China ill. For its part, the Police Force, despite months of sustained attacks on its officers and their families by supposedly “pro-democracy” elements, exercised maximum restraint throughout. Indeed, unlike their counterparts in, for example, Chile and France, the force killed none of the rioters who attacked them with petrol bombs and other weapons, no matter how extreme their violence. This was why, to drum up support from the likes of Patten and Rogers, the protest movement was reduced to fabricating atrocities, including the nonexistent killings of six protesters at Prince Edward Station on Aug 31, 2019, a lie to which Hong Kong Watch eagerly supplied oxygen.
Instead, therefore, of maligning Lee and the Police Force, Patten should be thanking them for having, against the odds, saved the city for which he once professed to care.
Be that as it may, Patten then switched his focus to Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, who, with other trustees of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, is being investigated by national security police for possible collusion with foreign forces. There are suspicions that the fund, which provided succor to the protest movement’s arrested operatives and assisted fugitives abroad, may have asked other countries or overseas organizations to sanction Hong Kong. Only time will tell if the Department of Justice decides there is enough evidence to prosecute anybody, but this has not stopped Patten from jumping the gun.
Having called Zen “one of Asia’s most celebrated and admired clerics”, Patten then quoted Myanmar’s Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, the cleric who baptized Rogers in 2013 and has been deployed by him ever since, as saying that Hong Kong had been “transformed into a police state”. Quite clearly, neither Patten nor Rogers had bothered to tell Bo that, in Hong Kong, nobody is above the law, and that, even if somebody enjoys an exalted status or has powerful friends, they must still expect to be investigated if they are suspected of violating the criminal law.
At this point, Patten paraded his theory that what really irked the Chinese authorities was Zen’s “criticism of the Vatican’s secret deals with the Chinese leadership”, a reference to the bridge-building efforts of recent years. Those efforts have been designed to establish better relations between the two sides, and to advance the interests of people of faith. This, inevitably, has upset the likes of Patten, Zen and Rogers, who prioritize confrontation over all else in official dealings with China, as Patten himself proved during his own ill-fated governorship.
What, however, reduced Patten to apoplexy was the Vatican’s observation that it would follow Zen’s situation “with extreme attention”. Unlike Patten, the Holy See apparently realizes that it is still early days, that there may not be a trial, and that, even if there is, there will be a conviction only if, as in England, where Patten lives, guilt has been proved beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law. These legal niceties, however, are lost on Patten, who, in all situations, only ever seeks an opportunity for mischief-making.
Indeed, in as vile a calumny as can be imagined, Patten even claimed that the Holy See’s stance toward China “brings to mind the church’s behavior towards the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s”. But, however much gibberish like this will have titillated Rogers and Zen, it will not have amused Pope Francis, who trusted Patten by appointing him a Vatican media adviser in 2014. His Holiness, however, may now be forgiven for wondering “with friends like this, who needs enemies”. It is, of course, not easy to see how slurs like this can ever be rationalized, and the only possible explanation is that Patten’s Sinophobia has finally destroyed whatever remains of his reasoning faculties.
One day, perhaps, Patten’s church may feel able to forgive him, just as it does with its other sinners. However, even if it does, nobody will ever again be able to trust his judgment, not even Hong Kong Watch. The moral of this sad tale, therefore, is that political platforms built on hatred will ultimately fail, and that, given enough rope, the Pattens of this world will ineluctably self-destruct.
As Coretta Scott King, Martin’s widow, once observed, hate “injures the hater more than it injures the hated”, for which proposition Patten is “Exhibit No 1”.
The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.