WHEN THEY first met, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, took a shine to Tung Chee-hwa, who would become, in effect, his successor, as the first chief executive from 1997 of what became a Chinese Special Administrative Region. “Not a bad man at all,” he noted in his diary in 1992. “Indeed, I rather like him.” He had just appointed Mr Tung, who died on September 8th at the age of 89, to his executive council (Exco), or cabinet, valuing him as a link to Hong Kong’s future rulers, the Chinese Communist Party.
Probably even then, the party had earmarked him as Hong Kong’s first Chinese ruler. He met several criteria. First, he was a businessman, not a politician, and China’s leaders had long insisted that Hong Kong must be an “economic city”, not a “political” one. Mr Tung had inherited the shipping firm, Orient Overseas, that his father had founded. Second, he was in Beijing’s debt. An ill-advised fleet expansion led the firm to bankruptcy in the mid-1980s from which it was rescued by a property Tycoon with close ties to the Beijing government and by Chinese state enterprises