This was the leading letter in the Financial Times on June 14. The title of this thread is the newspaper’s headline.


The meeting between Chinese premier Li Keqiang and Queen Elizabeth II next week provides a good opportunity for Her Majesty to apologise on behalf of her great-grandmother [in fact great-great-grandmother], Queen Victoria, for the opium trade and the Opium Wars. She might in particular refer to Her Majesty’s rudeness in never having replied to the very compelling and impassioned letter to Queen Victoria by Commissioner Lin Zexu in 1839 appealing to her better moral self to put this heinous trade to an end. … In fact the reply came in the form of gunboats, death, misery and destruction, and a few years later the looting of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.

An apology of this nature may also serve to remind us Europeans that while we admonish the Chinese today to be ‘responsible stakeholders’, when we were on top we did not play by the rules, because there were no rules, except for the rule of sheer brute force.

In recognising the destructive and immoral errors of our past, by making a sincere apology, the Queen could thereby lay robust foundations for a cordial, constructive, mutually reciprocal relationship in which both the letter and the spirit of the rules would be adhered to.

Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Emeritus Professor, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland
Visiting Professor, Hong Kong University

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I’m sorry that a professor, no less, should have written something so sophomoric. Sometimes, it seems, a person who has benefited from HK – from its freedom or its economic system or, in this case, from a respectable and well-remunerated appointment – feels he ought to distance himself and show how right-thinking he is by making an anti-colonial statement. He would not have written this letter if he had been teaching in a mainland university – but he wouldn’t have written an anti-communist letter, either.

Even if an apology is a sensible and proper thing to do, it is not only an ethical act, but also political. It would reinforce the self-righteousness of a country that would never apologise. And now, in 2014, rather than being ‘constructive’, it would somehow be used to further justify China’s opposition to electoral reform in HK, and even somehow to further justify China’s claims over the neighbouring seas.

The paradox is that the heinous trade brought into existence the place where we live, which – despite its troubles – has probably been, since 1842, the most fortunate place in China.