Lu Ping, the feisty Chinese diplomat who led negotiations over the handover of Hong Kong and warned that the territory’s last British governor would be “condemned through the ages”, has died aged 88 in Beijing.
A steely official with a love for classical music and good English skills thanks to his education at the missionary-founded St John’s University in Shanghai, he ran Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs office from 1990 until just after China assumed control over the financial centre in 1997.
Lu used the Chinese insult against Lord Patten in a press conference in 1993 when the former British Conservative party minister was proposing democratic reforms that Beijing viewed as an attempt to pull the rug from under its feet.
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