The Orwell Festival: Chris Patten on his Hong Kong Diaries

Monday 04 July 2022 @ 18:00

from £6

Darwin Building B40 LT, UCL, London

Chris Patten, former Governor of Hong Kong and current Chancellor of Oxford University, will be interviewed by Isabel Hilton, founder and senior adviser of China Dialogue, about his book The Hong Kong Diaries.

In June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not (as other British colonies over the decades) for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. Over the next five years he kept this diary, which describes in detail how Hong Kong was run as a British colony and what happened as the handover approached. The book gives unprecedented insights into negotiating with the Chinese, about how the institutions of democracy in Hong Kong were (belatedly) strengthened and how Patten sought to ensure that a strong degree of self-government would continue after 1997.

Book event