East and West by Chris Patten Macmillan 340pp, £22.50 in UK
This is the book Rupert Murdoch told his publishing house, HarperCollins, to dump during its gestation period on the grounds that it was too boring. Few doubted that the real reason was Mr Murdoch's fear that its criticisms of the communist government in China might affect the publisher's lucrative business interests in the Middle Kingdom.
East and West is in fact not so much boring as intense. This is not bedside reading. It is an extended essay on modern Asia from the perspective of a liberal British disciple of Rab Butler's enlightened capitalism, with lots of profound stuff about Asian values, freedom and the market, and post-colonial questions. By Mr Patten's account the offending chapter about China wasn't even written at the time he got stiffed by Mr Murdoch, though in fact animadversion to Beijing runs through this 340-page thesis like streaks in marble.
Those seeking the inside story of Mr Patten's five years in Hong Kong's Government House should look elsewhere - in the pages of The Last Governor, by Jonathan Dimbleby, with whom Mr Patten co-operated fully and indiscreetly, which was published last year (Little, Brown). The last governor let Mr Dimbleby dish the dirt in this surrogate memoir on those he perceived to kow-tow to the Chinese, such as Sir Percy Craddock, the former UK ambassador to China, who regularly fulminated against Patten for jeopardising the accommodations he had made with Beijing. In East and West Craddock is not even mentioned by name (the ultimate insult, to be disregarded as irrelevant), though presumably he is prominent among those whom the former governor scathingly describes as OCHs and OFOCs - Old China hands and Old Friends of China, figures who enjoy "paid official trips, official banquets, official stays in state guest houses, and official meetings at which mutual flattery is exchanged in prodigious quantities".
Mr Patten is certainly no OFOC. His pre-emptive proposals for more democracy for the legislative council in Hong Kong so angered Beijing that he was denounced by Chinese officials as "the whore of the East", a "serpent" and - this one really below the belt - "the tango dancer", a reference not to ballroom tendencies but to a comment he made about taking two to tango in negotiations. Mr Patten's attitude was that he saw no reason to "do the dirty work for China" by restricting democratic development in Hong Kong.
Possibly with an eye to his future political career in Westminster, he doesn't indulge in much name-calling on the British side, but the last Hong Kong viceroy pulls no punches when it comes to his Chinese tormentors. He slashes at communist Chinese icons. Chairman Mao was an "angel of death" who deserved a place in history with Pol Pot and Hitler. The "mulish opacity" of Chinese officialdom was typified, he writes, by the chief Chinese negotiator over the transfer of Hong Kong to the motherland, Jiang Enzhu, behind whose "sloppy smile lay the personality of a bureaucratic speak-your-weight machine". Those in Hong Kong who joined a Chinese-appointed preliminary working committee to prepare for the post-1977 government are dismissed as favoured henchmen of and "old time communist coelacanths, tycoons on the make, ambitious third-raters, knights and commanders (of the British Empire) who had found another empire to serve, and the earnestly ill-advised".
Mr Patten rails against the "purring acquiescence of much of the Hong Kong establishment" towards their new Beijing master, ignoring the fact that Britain had enjoyed that "purring acquiescence" for decades without a word of criticism. The nub of the matter is, in Mr Patten's view, that the new masters are not democratic but communist, who would instinctively oppose everything good about Hong Kong - its free press, its burgeoning democratic instincts, its financial transparency, its free capital markets. And there is no denying that Britain left a shining jewel for the Chinese government in the form of the freest, richest, most open, and least corrupt Asian metropolis north of Singapore. (There is also no denying that China has honoured its promise to leave Hong Kong to get on with its capitalist ways.)
It is Mr Patten's analysis of the values that underpinned and shaped British Hong Kong which takes up most of the book and makes it such a valuable addition to contemporary literature about the Orient. On this level it is an eloquent and well researched rubbishing of the concept of "Asian values", the "all-purpose justification for whatever Asian governments were doing or wished to do", which, he says, is trotted out by old men wanting to stay in power, old networks of corruption and regimes that feared the outcome of the ballot box. East and West is a comprehensive challenge to the champions of Asian values such as Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mohamad Mahathir, laden with pro-democracy quotations from Confucius selected to confound the Chinese communists.
Footnote: Mr Patten defends his use of the word "Peking" instead of "Beijing" for the Chinese capital, saying it is not an insult, and that he similarly doesn't refer to "Rome" as "Roma" or "Brussels" as "Bruxelles". This won't wash. His argument ignores the fact that he is out of step with the whole English-speaking world (except the London Independent and Kevin Myers) which uses Beijing, a word which is a product not of communism but of the standardisation of the English pronunciation of Mandarin in the 1950s. I think Mr Patten uses "Peking" precisely because he knows it gets up their noses - in Beijing.
Conor O'Clery is Asia Correspondent of The Irish Times, based in Beijing