One of Britain's Asian Disasters

[PeterRS]

Having had more than a dig at the USA in a recent thread, it's time I wrote a bit about my own country's major historical errors. One was colonialism which was at the time was thought of as Britain doing parts of the world a tremendous favour. Of course, it was nothing of the sort. It was purely for trade and bleeding countries of their natural resources.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I received my copy of the magazine of Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club of which I remain a proud member. It contains a series of articles from those who remember the negotitions leading up to the events of June 30/July 1 1997 when Britain handed back Hong Kong to Chinese rule. The 25th anniversary of that event took place litle over a month ago.

Why it took place was a result of one of the strange quirks of history. Having roundly beaten China's army in the first two Opium Wars, Britain and its opium traders forced China to hand over to it in perpetuity Hong Kong Island and then a large chunk of the Kowloon Peninsula. Later, following China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/5, Britain started gobbling up more of the Chinese mainland. It wanted to expand its holdings in Hong Kong. Accordingly it entered into negotiations for the rest of the Kowloon Peninsula and the much larger New Territories behind. Given that Britain then had the rest of Hong Kong in perpetuity, why did its negotiators, now in an extremely strong bargaining position, not insist that the New Territories also be handed over in perpetuity? Well, you can perhaps blame the Germans, for in April that country had negitiated a 99-year lease for a naval base in the Shandong Peninsula. A shorter lease had also been given to the Russians. So when it came time for British diplomats to negotiate Britain's terms, leases were the flavour of the month. So Britain went ahead and agreed a 99-year lease, no doubt never expecting this to cause any problems in the future.

Fast forward to 1978. The businessmen who basically ran Hong Kong needed time to make good - often excessive - returns on their investments. With no idea what might happen 20 years later, many became nervous about further investment and made their feelings known to the Governor, Sir Murray Maclehose. In any case, by this time the New Territories was providing much of ever-growing Hong Kong's need for agricultural produce. Maclehose had spent time in the Embassy in Beijing, spoke fluent Mandarin and knew some of the leadership. He was to become the longest serving Governor of Hong Kong and one of the most respected of them all. He decided the time had come to raise the matter of the 1997 lease with the government in Beijing. So in early 1979 he made a visit to Beijing to meet with Deng Xiao-ping.

On his return, Maclehose painted an upbeat picture - one, as I found out yesterday, he did not believe. He said that Deng had told him Hong Kong's investors should "put their hearts at ease," adding "it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mouse." "Black" and "white" were interpreted as meaning "capitalist" and "communist". But Deng was deliberately being opaque. He, probably more than anyone else in Beijing at the time, wanted all of Hong Kong back.

Britain's Margaret Thatcher arrived in Beijing to start formal negotiations. Maclehose had by this time retired and been replaced by another former civil servant with a vast knowledge of China and its leadership, Sir Edward Youde. Thatcher's position was made perfectly clear. Britain knew what was best for Hong Kong. Britain would not give back Hong Kong under any circumstances. When informed by Youde and her own advisers that Hong Kong could not survive on its own without the New Territories and without water, most of which was now being supplied through pipes from Guangdong Province, Thatcher's response was that she would moor large tankers in Hong Kong waters, these having been adapted to hold water instead of oil! 

Throughout, Thatcher's arguments were almost exclusively economic - how Hong Kong's continued prosperity under British rule would aid China as it developed its own economy. Before flying to Beijing, she insulted Deng by telling the world's media that the Chinese would have no clue how to run Hong Kong. Deng's arguments were equally simple. The Chinese had to right historical wrongs whatever the cost. Restating China's sovereignty over all of Hong Kong was more important than any economic argument. While Youde and the key figures in Thatcher's team understood the Chinese view, Thatcher never did - and she never wavered in her view.

The one group left out of the negotiations were the people of Hong Kong. Until, that is, fear raised its spectre. Aware through leaks that the negotiations were at an impasse, Hong Kong people started to panic. Several senior Chinese who were members of the Governor's unoffical "cabinet" flew to London to warn Britain of impending disaster. They were totally ignored and humiliated. There was a run on banks and one major one collapsed before being taken over by what is now HSBC. The Hong Kong dollar slowly at first collapsed against the US$, at one time losing 10% of its value in one day. It was quickly pegged to the US$ at 7.8 and that peg has remained to this day.

As we know, Thatcher was finally persuaded that she could never win. So she caved. Britain would hand over all of Hong Kong once the New Territories lease expired on June 30 1997.

It has always been assumed that the wily, highly experienced Maclehose had been pleased as a result of his meeting with Deng in 1979. In the issue of the Foreign Correspondents' Club magazine I read last night, this was far from the truth. Then the Managing Editor of a news feature programme on Hong Kong's ATV, Susan Yu covered the handover. She writes -

"I interviewed former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the Mandarin Oriental. She was brimming with pride that Great Britain had done its utmost to secure the best for Hong Kong. But my interview with Hong Kong's longest-serving Governor, Lord Murray Maclehose [long after his retirement], struck a completely different tone. He was contemplative and subdued. He recalled with great clarity his 1979 meeting with Deng in Beijing . . . Maclehose [also] had a very dim view of Britain's highly politicised management of Hong Kong during its final days (when for the first time ever Britain under John Major placed a self-serving politician, Chris Patten, as Governor instead of a former civil servant as had always been the case in the previous 150 years). Although he was locally very popular, Patten did an enormous amount of harm to Hong Kong and its future under Chinese rule. It has even been reported that John Major, seeing all this, tried to recall him. Patten refused.

"15 years later I bumped into a British former diplomat who had been a key member of Britain's 1997 negotiating team. I asked if he had any regrets. There was a long pause. With a deep sigh, he said, 'We could've done more. We should've done more.'"

Sadly, while Hong Kong flourished for almost 15 years under Chinese rule, the events set in motion by Patten were merely simmering under the surface. When they finally exploded in 2014, Hong Kong's Chinese appointed leader had no idea how to handle them. Some years later President Xi had had enough. He broke international law and put his own people into Hong Kong. It is now a very changed city. And that has directy led to much greater complications for Taiwan.

[PeterRS]

Apologies! In the 3rd last paragraph above, I should have inserted inverted commas after 'final days' in line 5. The remainder of that paragraph are my comments. The quote from Susan Yu restarts in the next paragraph.

[Lonnie]

5 hours ago, PeterRS said:

President Xi had had enough.

My biggest disappointment is that Britain never levied any real cost to the CCP for breaking the 50 year agreement.

Lenin never understood human nature but the darker side of capitalism he knew extremely well when he said  "The capitalists will sell us the rope of which we'll hang them."

[PeterRS]

My heading is perhaps misleading, for I should not have included "One of". Throughout history, especially the history of the 20th century, Britain made a great many mistakes. Surely none is greater that the ignominy of its hasty and ill-thought out departure from India, the effects of which are still being felt in that country today.

The issue should have been simple enough. When Britain took over rule in India from the failing British East india Company whose monopoly of trade on the sub-contnent had been broken in 1813, it regarded itself, as usual, as a moralising force. Even today there are those, mostly of the older generation, who talk of India almost with tears in their eyes. British administration made India work, they claim, and the creation of the huge Indian rail network is just one example of how it brought the country together. It was through no error that Britain's Queen Victoria was given the title Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. *

All that mumbo-jumbo aside, British rule was being undermined for much of the early 20th century as religious issues came to dominate the agenda. A former British civil servant had helped form an Indian Congress in 1885. This was to give educated Indians a platform in which they could take part in civil and political discussions. It never did much more than that until well into the 20th century when it became a movement primarily for all Hindu Indians. The Muslim commiunity had always regarded the Congress with suspicion. Even many Hindus felt similarly believing the Congress to particularly too pro-British. Soon the Hindus wanted a state of their own. Then the Muslims wanted a state they could call their own. Talks in the 1930s were largely cosmetic, until the then Governior General, Lord Linlithgow, declared India at war against Hitler on the side of the allies without his ever consulting any of the members of Congress or any other Indian.

By the end of World War II, Britain was bankrupt and exhasted. It owed a huge debt to the USA which, being staunchly anti-colonial, was pressing Britain to give up her colonial Empire. In 1948 then Governor-General Viscount Wavell was replaced by the very bisexual (I know that's rather irrelevant but sometimes history needs to be spiced up a little!) Earl Mountbatten. At least he knew quite a bit about Asia having been the Supreme Alllied Commander in South East Asia during the War. A great grandson of Queen Victoria, he played up his royal connections to the hilt. But he knew his rule in Delhi was to be temporary. Britain's Prime Minister Clement Atlee had given him the brief that Britan was to get out of India within 16 months. He was also saddled with the instruction that there was to be no partition of India and ensure that Britain got out of the country with minimal reputational damage. He achieved neither.

By all accounts, Mountbatten thoroughly enjoyed his time in India. While his wife was sleeping around, most notably with the man who was eventually to become India's First Prime Minister, Nehru, Louis was indulging in trysts with young Indian boys. In 1944 the FBI had opened its first file on the Mountbattens. It contains the sentence, "Lord Louis Mountbatten was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys . . . he and his wife are considered persons of extremely low morals." An openly gay British MP Tom Driberg later claimed that "Mountbatten had a fetish for uniforms - handsome young men in military uniforms (and high boots) and beautiful boys in school uniform."

What went on in his bedroom was as nothing compared to what was simmering outside, however. The Muslim leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah, a British educated barrister, had returned from London in the late 1930s and fired up the Muslim League to press for a separate Islamic State. By the end of the war, Mountbatten had two angry men tugging at his instructions, each demanding separate states. Finally Mountbatten saw no solution other than partition, precisely what London had instructed was not to happen. India was then a complicated country but the majority Muslim states were in the north-east and north-west. For some reason that is not only hard to fathom, it seems more than downright reckless, Mountbatten had a British barrister Sir Cyril Radcliffe sent from London and given 5 weeks to partition the country into two states.

Radcliffe was a uniquely strange choice. He had never been to India and knew absolutely nothing about the country. He didn't want to go. When he got there, he loathed the heat, humdity, the people and the food. “Why? Oh, why was I chosen for this job?” was his constant refrain. His only desire was to get his job done fast and return to England. Yet he was not based in Delhi. He was up in the summer retreat of Shimla where the temperature hovered around a pleasant 20-22 degrees! He had no time to visit any of the territories he was arbitrarily cutting in two. Frankly, he did not really care. He finished the job two days short of the deadline. 

Thus the fate of many hundreds of millions of Indians - Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims - was sealed. Radcliffe had split the Punjab in the east and Bengal in the west allowing for two Pakistans and one India. His demarcation line had split villages in two, sometimes separating entire families. How and why did he make those decisions? No one now knows for he burnt all his papers before he left, refused to accept his £40,000 fee and returned to his home comforts of England.

What had actually happened was one of the most humungous errors in British colonial history. The massacres started almost as soon as Radcliffe departed. Neighbours slaughtered neighbours on an unbelievable scale. Lifelong friends became bitter enemies. One of the largest migrations in human history started. More than half a million were slaughtereed and trainloads of dead travelled in each direction.

Ironically it was Jinnah, who had insisted on the creation of Pakistan, who proved the loser. He had always insisted that Muslims were not welcome in India. Yet years after the partition, many millions of Muslims remained in India and became citizens of the new secular state. It was Jinnah's Muslim homeland that never settled. It could not be Muslim and embrace secularism. Within little more than 20 years, Pakistan had witnessed one major political assassination, two wars, seven Prime Ministers, one military coup and two martial-law administrators. Then in 1971 East Pakistan broke free and formed Bangladesh. In the resulting war, between 500,000 and 3 million were killed.

Mountbatten's arbitrary decision to hand over the partition of colonial India to an ignorant British barrister with not the slightest knowledge of what he was doing was one of the ugliest and most disgraceful chapters in British history. Saddest of  all, most all who were massacred as a result were innocent civilians.