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Hong Kong.
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Draft Article for The Spectator
by the Governor
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Earlier this year, one of Hong Kong's pro-China newspapers published a series of supplements which purported to chronicle Britain's departure from Empire. The authorised Peking version told a story of imperial cumming, in which Britain's whole conspiratorial purpose had been to prolong her influence through delayed-action detonation of chaos wherever The Queen's writ had once
Now, allegedly, we are doing the same in Hong
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Kong.
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It's a bizarre view of our colonial history: a history in which we laid down the imperial burden with so little fuss, and such genial intentions to install and safeguard the institutions of a plural society.
In Hong Kong, we are bringing the chang: chmeek be an end. Hong Kong, of course, is unlike our other
colonies. Though no one could doubt the capacity of this great city, it has never enjoyed the prospect of independence. History and geography have spelt out another future, the assumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997. This has determined and constrained political and institutional development in the territory. While it
has been governed under the eyes of Parliament at Westminster, its own democratic evolution, has been limited by its historic destination.
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So democracy was never really on the agenda, until
we came to negotiate the terms of the transfer of sovereignty. At the heart of those negotiations was the promise that, while China's flag would be run up over