Book Description
How will Asia--its vast population, its swirling
politics, its recently challenged economics--change our
world? Few Western political figures can answer that
question as well as Christopher Patten. For five years,
Fatten was the governor of Hong Kong, and as China
prepared to reclaim its people and its land, he struggled
to put in place democratic institutions that would ensure
Hong Kong's continued vitality.
In East and West, Patten draws on those
struggles to give us an intimate portrait of the real
Asia, in all its diversity, and to make a vital argument
for the common interest of Eastern and Western powers.
The result is a startling departure from the conventional
wisdom about China, power, and the future of Asia.
Starting from his own experience as governor, his
attempt to introduce democracy to Hong Kong, and his
often difficult relationship with both Chinese and
Western business and political interests, Patten
addresses some of the most vital, and often confused,
issues of the coming century.
Patten dismisses talk of a monolithic "Asian
value system"--in the East as well as the West--as a
self-serving excuse for authoritarianism. While tumbling
currencies have silenced talk of "the Asian economic
miracle," scholars and politicians still make a
living touting Asian exceptionalism, many suggesting that
what works for the West cannot work for the East. But
Patten argues that it already has. What took place in
Asia in the last thirty years, he says, was similar to
the industrialization of Europe and the United States,
only much faster.
Ultimately, Patten argues that free markets and free
politics sustain each other. In the East and in the West,
political liberty and economic freedom march together.
"I believe a process has likely begun which is
irreversible," Patten writes, "and which will
ensure that the next century belongs not to Asia or
America or any other continent, but to those values which
best combine decency and a good life. A hundred years
ago, A. E Housman's 'steady drummer best a warning of
death and misery to come. Today, on the threshold of
another century, the omens seem better. Eastward as well
as westward, the land is bright."
