Newspapers in China called Chris Patten a criminal, a serpent, and a whore. The country’s politicians and diplomats alternately snubbed him, scolded him, and threatened him. He was second-guessed and undercut by traditionalists in Britain’s Foreign Office and by many of Hong Kong’s business elite. After HarperCollins infamously dropped his memoirs when company owner Rupert Murdoch concluded that the book’s contents would offend business contacts in Asia, Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart took the book on.

As Patten shows in East and West, the hostility and controversy have left him unbowed and unrepentant. East and West is partly the tale of Patten’s days as Hong Kong’s last British governor and partly a reflection on the prerequisites and prospects of democracy, freedom, and prosperity in Asia, Europe, and North America. Best known (and, in China, most hated) for bringing partial democracy to Hong Kong, Patten defends his record and the broader cause of political and economic liberty with combative intelligence, erudition, and wit. He characterizes China’s position on Hong Kong elections, for example, as “mulish opacity,” made worse by the irksome nature of the chief negotiator, whose “sloppy smile” hid the “personality of a bureaucratic speak-your-weight machine.” Drawing on sources as diverse as Confucius, T. S. Eliot, and the statisticians of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Patten also attacks the argument often made by Asian leaders that free speech and individual liberty have no place in the East because they clash with traditional Asian values. He dismisses the idea as a transparent excuse for oppressive leaders to go on oppressing.

Though Patten is consistently convincing and entertaining, the book could have been crisper and more focused. There are too many meandering and repetitive chapters that – despite Patten’s tone of discovery and wonder – reflect nothing more interesting than the conventional political and economic wisdom of the British Conservative Party, for which he once toiled. But with its rich store of observations and anecdotes about Asian politics and culture, presented from the unique perspective of a European who governed a great Asian city, this is crucial reading for anyone interested in the similarities, differences, and increasingly complex relations between East and West.