Remembering the handover

Rifkind, who served as the United kingdom's cabinet minister under former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major for 18 continuous years, sums up his career in his autobiography Power and Pragmatism. Nick J.B. Moore / For China Daily

The autobiography of Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former UK foreign secretary, recounts the negotiations up to the return of Hong Kong to China on June 30, 1997. Andrew Moody reports.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, UK foreign secretary in the run up to the Hong Kong handover 20 years ago this year, says he was going to choose a title for his autobiography that might have chimed with Chinese notions of longevity and respect for the elderly.

"My first draft title for the book, which my publishers were amused by but not particularly impressed with, wasMy Early Life: The First Seventy Years, which a Chinese audience would have appreciated," he says.

"We are told the lifespan is going to be a lot more than it would have been once upon a time, but this was seen as slightly frivolous."

The title eventually chosen wasPower and Pragmatism, concepts that perhaps best sum up the career of the respected Scottish politician who served as a cabinet minister under former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major for 18 continuous years, a feat (shared with three other of his ministerial colleagues) not achieved since the 1820s.

Rifkind, who was speaking in the lounge of the Intercontinental London Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair, says that a pragmatic politician differs from a conviction politician in that they do not feel guilty adapting their positions to circumstances.

"The pragmatist is much more relaxed about it. It doesn't mean the pragmatist has no convictions but if you are dealing with a problem and your previous conceptual or philosophical preference does not add up, it is OK to ask, what else would work?"

In the book - full of dry observations and witty anecdotes - he recounts the negotiations up to the handover of Hong Kong back to China on June 30, 1997.

He was foreign secretary up until a month before when the Conservatives suffered a landslide defeat at the hand of incoming Labour prime minister Tony Blair and he himself lost his Edinburgh Pentlands seat in parliament, which he had held for 23 years.

He held his first meeting with Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen in London in 1995 and when he visited Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland the following January he was given the nickname in the local press of Li Wenjun, which in Chinese means a cultured gentleman.

"Much of the hard work had already been done by Margaret Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe (the former foreign secretary who had negotiated the 1984 Joint Declaration that paved the way for the handover). So I was just dealing with a number of unresolved issues, or new issues that had arisen. It was not too difficult," he says.

"Because we were approaching the moment of truth, obviously within Hong Kong itself there was increased nervousness about what the changeover would mean."

Rifkind makes the point that Beijing resuming control of Hong Kong was an unprecedented event with nothing similar ever happening before.

"It was a unique problem which required unique solutions so it is fair to say that Hong Kong remains governed by a different system to the rest of China," he says.

"The fundamental commitment to two systems in one country has been honored, in the sense you know."

The book charts his career from an up-and-coming Scottish advocate to being elected as a member of parliament in just his late 20s.

Although gifted with an uncanny ability to speak without notes, honed in debates at Edinburgh university, he is slightly bemused by his reputation as an intellectual which he modestly says belied his actual academic achievements at school.

His first cabinet appointment came under Thatcher when he was made secretary of state for Scotland in 1986 before heading up transport and defense on the way to the foreign office.

Rifkind says he is not surprised that China has emerged as such a powerful economy over the past 40 years.

"It was always inevitable that would happen. You cannot have a country the size of China with such a huge population as well as its historical and cultural identity going back 2,000 years where that was not the case," he says.

He believes former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up agenda in the late 1970s proved the catalyst.

Rifkind, who supported the UK remaining in the European Union, says the UK's uncertain status makes it more difficult for the Chinese and others to make investment decisions.

"Clearly, any major companies from other parts of the world, who have a European market with a headquarters in the UK, ask themselves: 'What does this mean for us?'"

He, however, believes the UK will prove resilient in the end.

"If you have only 65 million people and you are the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, that is an enormous economic achievement. That strength didn't begin when we joined the EU and it doesn't disappear because we have left it."

Rifkind had to resign from his seat before the 2015 general election having been caught up in a sting by the Channel 4 Dispatches program, where he was secretly filmed discussing a potential board position for a fictitious East European company.

Suggestions that there was a conflict of interest were later dismissed as groundless by the parliamentary standards commissioner.

The veteran politician, who was about to address a conference on the Middle East, says he felt it was the right time to set the record straight on many aspects of his life by writing his autobiography.

"I'd always sort of assumed that in the dim and distant future I would sort of write a book of this kind. And it was about a year ago that I gradually had to come to terms with the fact that, as I was approaching 70, the dim and distant future had arrived."

Contact the writer at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn