"WHAT have you learned from the Chinese?" I asked Governor Chris Patten. "Oh, I think that's simple," he replied. "If somebody tries to bully you and you roll over, they do it again."
He added by way of explanation: "We all become so obsessed with the differences between cultures that we don't notice the similarities, and I think that there is absolutely no reason at all why we should treat China in a completely different way from how we treat anybody else."
A note of disdain for Beijing, which Mr Patten still calls Peking, pervaded a wide-ranging interview in the elegant governor's residency overlooking Hong Kong. He spoke about his problems with the Chinese, how the end of empire would affect the United Kingdom, and his personal plans for the future.
Hone Kong's 28th and last British governor will leave the colony at midnight on June 30th as the red flag goes over the 141-year-old building which for a century and half hash symbolised British rule. He will depart on the royal yacht Britannia, with Prince Charles, sailing off into the darkness to a destination which, he said, "has yet to be announced".
It'll be typhoon season. What if there is a storm? "If, there's a typhoon then we'll have a very unsettled journey because I don't think the ship in question has stabilisers," he said. "It will be like the Irish Sea on a dark February night."
It was a rare light-hearted comment in an otherwise sombre interview tinged with foreboding about the coming handover.
"I think if the television picture that is flashed around the world to mark the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty is thousands of troops marching over the border, I'm not sure that is an image which if I was the new chief executive I would yearn for," he said glumly. "So I hope that the Chinese will think again about that."
There was a sense of betrayal too from the way some people were rushing to embrace Beijing. Mr Patten had just learned that day that 32 - more than half of the members of his elected legislative council had decided to apply for membership of the 400-member provisional legislature created by China, which he calls a "rubber stamp".
He found this "not very surprising, moderately dispiriting though he noted that the Democratic Party legislators who "enjoy the most comprehensive public mandates have kept well clear of the whole shabby exercise".
China objected strongly to the creation of the first elected assembly by Mr Patten two years ago and has created a hand-picked legislature-in-waiting so that it can dismiss the current body when it takes over.
"If you ask me whether these people who are appointing one another to this body, whether people who are going to serve on this `rubber stamp' with the principal criteria, it seems, that they lost an election to the legislative council, will be making a big contribution to public life in Hong Kong in five or 10 years time, no I don't," he said scathingly.
The argument he had with the Chinese in 1992-93 "was about our attempt to implement what had been promised in 1984 in a decent way", he said, referring to the 1984 Joint Declaration signed by Britain and China.
"When I came to Hong Kong in July 1992 I went around the political groups trying to find, within the constraints of the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law, an acceptable way of running our elections. The democrats by and large wanted me to increase the number of directly elected seats but I never thought that was possible at this stage of the transition. What I tried to find was everybody's second best, which was by and large what we came off with. I found myself criticised by the democrats for not having gone far enough and the pro-Peking United Front brigade as having gone too far."
And as regards the argument that he could have created a "flawed legislature" which would have survived, "I didn't see the persuasive case for doing the dirty, work for some Chinese officials," he said. "That's what it amounted to. What they wanted us to do was to put in place arrangements which candidly would have been specifically designed to reduce the number of democrats elected to the council and to connive at arrangements which would have enabled them to chuck legislators who they didn't like off the legislative council in 1997. Those were the two issues on which the talks broke down."
Would we have had a quiet life if we had gone along with what China wanted? "We might have had a quiet time with China but we'd have had a hell of a noisy time here," he said. "I certainly don't think it would have given us four years of peace and stability."
The most sophisticated argument "against my view or Mickey Mouse's view or Ronald McDonald's view of doing business with China", said Mr Patten, referring to a decision last month by Walt Disney to resist Chinese pressure over a Dalai Lama film, "is that you just make things worse".
If one didn't accept that "the only acceptable compromise is a Chinese victory" and tried to put in place protections for people's civil liberties, the argument was that the Chinese will take away more of those liberties after 1997. I never thought it was very persuasive to say that we should do things that we believed were wrong before 1997 for fear that Chinese officials may do worse things after 1997," he said.
While vowing to have nothing to do with China's provisional legislature Mr Patten appeared willing to co-operate with Hong Kong's chief executive-in-waiting, due to be sworn in today and appointed by a committee whose members were approved by Beijing. "I am responsible for running Hong Kong until July 1st and I would not of course do anything at all which gave any support to the `rubber stamp'," he said, but he agreed he might be a bridge with the Chinese. "It may be possible for the government to make more rapid progress when there's a chief executive on some of the issues that are still stymied, like right of abode, because he'll be - I hope - standing up for Hong Kong's interests."
Mr Patten would not be drawn on how many refugee Chinese dissidents were in Hong Kong but British officials have indicated privately that they can leave if they wish. There are said to be about 80 in all. Had China a list? "I think they might have a good idea who many of them are," he said. Some had come to terms with the post-Tiananmen world, he added. But "it's likely that some of them will not wish to be in Hong Kong after 1997".
Chinese officials have said they would not tolerate commemorations in Hong Kong of the 1989 suppression of students in Beijing. Mr Patten remarked. "There is nothing in Hong Kong law to prevent people from commemorating peacefully each year the killings in Tiananmen. They do that in large numbers with considerable dignity. Now it's difficult to see how you can stop people doing things like that without restricting their freedoms, freedoms which are guaranteed under the international covenant which China has accepted should apply to Hong Kong."
The impact on the United Kingdom of losing Hong Kong would be "not very much", he said. "For most people in Britain, empire ended a long time ago. And I don't think that Hong Kong has ever had in terms of cultural, political and economic impact the same relationship with the UK and UK politics as the Raj India." There hadn't been anything like the literary impact of Paul Scott and Rudyard Kipling who had such a profound impact on British culture.
"I don't think that many people regard colonial responsibilities as still being part of Britain's role in the world. To that extent I think people regard Hong Kong as a strange, unique anachronism" he reflected.
This was the only time Britain had had to hand over a dependent territory to another sovereign power. It created moral issues which he had had to face.
He defended his style of dealing with the Chinese, which critics say comes from a House of Commons culture unsuited to the Far East. "I think it's worth remembering that I had a reputation in politics for being irredeemably wet and excessively consensual and I haven't changed at all," he said. "The abuse, the Cultural Revolution language, hasn't all come from me. It's come from them, and I think that's all part of Leninist propaganda and United Front tactics." He added: "I wouldn't have been able to govern Hong Kong so well if I had simply rolled over."
As for the future after he leaves on the Britannia on the final day: "I'm going to take at least six or seven months to write a book about Aria and Hong Kong and to get my garden in France into shape," Mr Patten said. He emphasised that he was not interested in running for parliament or giving lectures in that period.
Was he ambitious to lead the Conservative Party some day? "Only in the sense that I've got ambitions to play tennis at Wimbledon, which is unlikely to happen. I think it's incredibly unlikely."
He did not rule out a future political career. I asked him if he though( the Northern Ireland situation, in which he was involved in government was closer to resolution. "God, I hope so," he said. He recalled how Norman Dugdal, one of his personal secretaries; had quoted lines from Louis McNiece's episcopal father which he had never forgotten. It was along the lines of "one should understand the past the better to forget it", he said.