HONG KONG, June 25: The overriding reality in this last outpost of the British empire is that the hype about democracy has little to do with democracy. What's going on is a game of oneupmanship in which a retreating Britain is trying to score points over an advancing China.

``Governor Chris Patten,'' said a Chinese political scientist working for an American company, ``has won an enormous PR battle. But he has violated the Sino-British agreement of 1984. If you read only the English press, you won't see this at all.''

Patten turned things around for what is called the handover with an eye on making up for a British blunder in 1979. Until then China had no intention of taking Hong Kong when the lease expired in 1997. After all, it had never recognised the ``unequal treaties'' by which Hong Kong became a British territory, so it was prepared to let the deadline pass in ``creative ambiguity.''

But Britain raised the issue in legalistic terms in 1979. Margaret Thatcher had apparently wondered why she could not handle Hong Kong the way she had handled the Falklands. It took the astute British diplomat Percy Craddock to talk her out of it. But China's pride had been pricked and events moved on to the 1984 Joint Declaration and the ``handover'' next Monday night.

Having boxed itself into a position of losing Hong Kong, lock, stocks and profits, Britain set out to do what it has always excelled in: It began to squeeze the best out of bad situation. It started by sending to Hong Kong a nice-guy Governor with a nice-guy wife -- rather like Louis and Edwina Mountbatten being despatched to India.

The size of India and the political opportunities of the time made Mountbatten's task an easy though lethal one. Hong Kong is too small to be partitioned. So they picked democracy as the most convenient means to muddy the waters.

The first part of Patten's strategy was to hold Hong Kong up as the grandest economic marvel of modern times thanks to British stewardship. Every kit presented to interested citizens and visitors as well as journalists has a two-page listing of Hong Kong superlatives.

Sample: The world's freest economy; the world's most service-oriented economy; Asia's highest per capita income; the world's largest exporter of clocks, toys and seven other items; Asia's highest concentration of fund managers; Asia's highest rate of telephone penetration; the world's busiest container port.

Most of this is true. But Patten's parallel strategy of democracy and reforms has been a different matter. For 151 of the 156 years of British rule in Hong Kong, there was never any talk of democracy or elections. In fact the colonial rulers were quite ruthless in the early years and whenever there were local stirrings against them like in the 1967 ``race riots.''

Patten's widely touted democracy is in fact quite marginal. What has been propagated round the world is that an elected legislature Britain put in place is going to be replaced by an appointed legislature China put together. Actually only 20 out of 60 members of Patten's legislatures are directly elected.

The others came in through narrowly defined electoral colleges. What really offended China was that the last round of elections under Patten was in violation of the 1984 Joint Declaration. This also offended senior British leaders. Former Foreign Secretary and Percy Craddock have publicly criticised Patten's politics, rather unusual for the British establishment.

Asian leaders too have questioned the democracy ploy, among them an Anglophile like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and the outspoken Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.