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Governor's speech at the University of Buckingham in London
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Following is the speech entitled "The Future of Hong Kong" delivered by the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, at the University of Buckingham in London today (Monday):
Vice Chancellor, first of all thank you very much indeed for those kind introductory words. I am delighted to be here this evening and one reason why I am delighted to be here is because the invitation came from you, Vice Chancellor.
There can have been nothing more exotic, nothing more unique in the history of the British Empire than Britain's relationship with, and responsibility for, Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is Britain's last great colony, one of the greatest trading cities in the world like London, New York, Amsterdam. It has no canals but it is not vulgarly hyperbolic to think of it as, in a sense, the Venice of Asia. It could be in the near future, as William Rees Mogg argued recently, literally the richest city in the world. It has a GDP per head higher than that of the sovereign power.
On a few rocky islands, a range of hills, a damp plain at the furthest tip of China, six million people, mainly refugees, run an economy equivalent in economic value to about a quarter of that of the whole of China. So Britain has a strange and romantic responsibility and as I said a unique one too.
Elsewhere, the story of the end of Empire has been the story of the preparations for independence from India to Zimbabwe. Britain has, as Nelson Mandela argued, given the people of its colonial territories the means to end their dependency on Westminster. The Rule of Law, clean public administration, a democratic Legislature, all those things have been put together on the launching pad, we have ignited the rockets and blasted the satellite into outer space. Sometimes it has gone into orbit and sometimes, alas, it has come crashing to the ground. However, always, or at least usually, it has been an honourable effort to give those colonies a decent, independent future infused with the values of liberal democracy.
Hong Kong has always been in a different category. There were suggestions in the 1940s and 1950s that we should begin in Hong Kong the process of democratisation that had started elsewhere in the Empire. Those proposals were attacked by Chinese spokesmen, who argued that that would give the people of Hong Kong the wrong idea that they were going to determine at some stage their own destiny; that they were going to become independent too. And there were opponents in Hong Kong who argued that it would be a provocative distraction, in a community