The re-election of Donald Trump will make it harder to form an effective alliance to prevent China from destroying the rule of law, the former governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten has said. Speaking to the increasingly influential China Research Group (CRG), a Conservative lobbying organisation, he said the wind was in the sails of those seeking to stand up to Chinese bullying, but that the US presidential elections would be very important in ensuring the liberal democratic case against China found support. “The Chinese can always win if they can pick off one country against another,” he said. “It is very, very difficult to make any coherent international policy work which goes to the fundamentals of being a liberal democracy that does not have the leadership of the US.”
Patten previously said the task of creating a unified approach on Hong Kong had been made more difficult by the fact that “the so-called leader of the west, the present American president, doesn’t seem to believe very much in alliances”. He urged Britain to take the helm in building this alliance, saying the UK had to play “a leading role in putting together an intelligent group of countries which are saying we are not prepared to have the 21st century destroyed in terms of the rule of law by the Chinese dictatorship”. Patten also called for Britain to independently examine every aspect of its economic relations and its future research coordination with China. He said a large part of the review should be into reciprocal access to markets and previous Chinese government commitments to make large-scale investment. “Being open about this would show we are not being scared witless,” he said. “We are facing some really difficult choices, but we have made those choices more difficult for ourselves because of the way we have behaved over the last 10 years or so.” The mood on the Conservative benches towards Beijing is increasingly antagonistic, and as a former Hong Kong governor, Patten’s strategic advice is increasingly sought by Tory MPs wrestling with how to respond to China’s rise and the imposition of new security laws in Hong Kong. During the CRG seminar he held off from directly saying that all international judges should pull out of the Hong Kong court of appeal, but said given the overarching Orwellian nature of the security law, “it does seem to me it is rather difficult [to see] how any judge with integrity can implement that”. Patten said the Hong Kong chief executive, Carrie Lam, could now select the judges for any trial and choose whether to hold trials in secret. He likened the security law to an “anaconda in the chandelier”. “You do not know when it is going to drop on you. That is the point of it. The definition of what you can actually do and get away with is going to be made on political grounds,” he said. Patten said the UK had to show greater solidarity with countries that found themselves in China’s sights. “When China uses hostage diplomacy, we should be in there complaining alongside the Canadians,” he said. “When they use trade bullying with Australia because the Australians ask for a full inquiry into how this virus started, we should make it clear we are on the Australians’ side. We should have been more publicly on the side of the Swedes, the Norwegians, the South Koreans when they are bullied by China.”