Not sure if this is the right forum but seemed best.
Let’s say that the USA and EU decided that having a west-friendly Hong Kong was worth antagonising China over and convinced the UK to keep hold of it while committing to putting the effort in to supply anything they get from the mainland.
Would it be possible with public backing from EU and US?
What scale of supply operation would be required?
What would be the likely fallout?
I doubt China would want war over it but would probably make supplying HK as expensive as they could. Maybe start playing Russia’s election interface game in earnest.
Hard to see how the West could keep Hong Kong out of Chinese hands if it came down to war. It would be maybe 50 times harder than the Falklands campaign. China could mass a million troops right next door to Hong Kong a stone’s throw away, or blockade it entirely(virtually no agriculture or fossil fuel resources in Hong Kong proper.) Short of Stalingrading the city, I don’t see how the Brits or Yanks can do it.
Sure. It probably would have happened had China and the USSR not had a falling out, giving Nixon the idea to cultivate China as a potential foil for the US against the Soviets. Most likely (mainland) China wouldn’t have taken over Taiwan’s seat either, thus the UNSC would mainly be the Soviets against everyone else.
Nothing. Why would it take some ‘scale of supply operation’? Basically, it would have just been maintaining the status quo. China would have been unhappy, but China at the time was nothing like China today, and even if they maintained good relations with the USSR it wouldn’t have been enough for them to seriously contemplate trying to take Hong Kong by force. MAYBE they could have brought it to the world court and gotten the UK to give back the territory based on the original lease, but my WAG is that it would have been held up for years, maybe decades.
China wouldn’t be what they are today. US/China relations would be as terrible as they were before Nixon, and that would almost certainly hold true for most if not all of the US’s allies. China probably would have had to tuck tail and go back into the Soviet sphere…that is, after all, what the Soviets were aiming for and it would have had to happen, since on it’s own and without the US, Europe and the Wests trade China couldn’t have home grown their economy enough to break out of the Soviet sphere. On the other side, the world would be over $9 trillion dollars poorer, you’d have global poverty almost certainly stagnating where it was before China started it’s rise and things would be markedly worse on that front with very little hope of change.
I’m assuming the OP is talking about handing back the New Territories (which were leased for ninety-nine years ending in 1997) and keeping Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula (which had been granted to Britain forever). I doubt China would have been willing to go to war over it.
Economically, it would have been difficult to sustain Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula if China had cut off supplies. These are the most densely populated parts of Hong Kong, holding about half of HK’s population in less than 15% of its land. And most of HK’s shipping facilities are located in the New Territories.
Well that’s easy enough. They certainly didn’t want to be part of the CCP and preferred to stay under the British rule if it’s an either/or choice. In this hypothetical world they wouldn’t have had to fight so hard for the one country two system rules that the CCP has been undermining for over a decade now.
Maybe. I bet that the beginning of the transfer wouldn’t have started in the 80’s though…my WAG is the UK would have dragged things out until 1997 and THEN started talking about the turn over, and perhaps negotiated with the much weakened CCP for some heavy material concessions just to turn over the NT. This would have been after the fall of the USSR and Soviet state, so hard to say what shape China would be in at this point. It’s the butterfly flapping it’s wings here, and it would be a lot different.
China wouldn’t have gone to war with the UK or the west over Hong Kong or the NT. Hell, they might not have seen a real point had they stuck to Mao era economics even after he died. Deng might not have even been premier in a China where there wasn’t a rapprochement with the US and the west (which is the only way I see the UK not handing back Hong Kong), and even if he was he probably wouldn’t have been doing economic reforms since trade wouldn’t have really opened up.
Just came back from visiting my kid in Hong Kong. You probably aren’t aware that Hing Kong used to suffer from periodic droughts. That ended when they built a water pipe to China. China cuts that off and the next drought could cause real problems.
Cite is a film I saw at the Hong Kong history museum.
True enough, but a treaty for water was signed with (mainland) China in 1965. Granted, they could cut water to the peninsula and island, but it was one of the few accesses they had for hard currency so it’s hard to see them doing so depending on how this alternative history plays out (perhaps the USSR and China are on more friendly terms and hard currency isn’t as important or necessary). If history is exactly the same as it was then it was the US as much as anyone who pressured the UK into turning over Hong Kong in its entirety to the CCP (and getting mainland China the seat at the UNSC that Taiwan had before). If the Nixon never goes to China and the US doesn’t push for China to take a more active place in trade and with the world in general then China would be in a much weaker position wrt being able to pressure the UK…and the US would be much more sympathetic to continuing that colonialism and supporting the UK in any disputes.
It may have been one of their few accesses to hard currency in 1965, but the “alternative” part of this alternative history seems to me to refer to events in 1997 when, in real-world history, Hong Kong was returned to the PRC. And by 1997, of course, China had no shortage of access to hard currency.
1997 is the relevant date because that’s when the lease on the New Territories expired. At that point, the UK had to decide whether to hang on to Hong Kong without the assent of the PRC, or hand it back. And therefore we need to be looking at the PRC’s strategic and tactical situation in 1997.
Could they have cut off Hong Kong’s water in 1997? Well, there may have been considerations militating against it, but “needs hard currency” would certainly not have been one of them.
Could Hong Kong have survived without the water supply from the PRC? Well, per Voyager’s quote the colony experienced water stress during periods of drought up to 1965. But by 1997 the population of the colony was nearly twice as great, and living standards had risen so I’m guessing that water consumption was much more than twice as great. I think the loss of the water supply would have been a huge problem.
Because the New Territories weren’t included in the 1841 Treaty of Nanking. Rather they were acquired in the Second Convention of Peking in 1898. Politics were a bit different then and the 99-year lease matched one extracted by the Germans for Kiautschou Bay. Moreover the British negotiator in a bit of short-sightedness thought 99 years was enough for it to effectively become permanent.
China could cut off the food (maybe this could be supplied internationally at a much higher cost)
HK economy has been hollowed out. Bulk of manufacturing went to China decades ago.
Tourist trade has shifted and is now highly dependent on Mainland money
Finally, I have to say, that Honkies were major dicks to the Mainland Chinese in in the 90’s. Based on personal experience of my wife during that time.
Then we need a more detailed scenario. If China has ceded Hong Kong (inc. the New Territories) permanently, 1997 has no special significance. So we have to ask when and how the issue of the UK holding Hong Kong against the opposition of China comes to a head. The relative strategic positions of the two sides obviously changes over time.
China had ‘no shortage of access to hard currency’ in our timeline. Because the US had normalized relations with China as a wedge against the USSR. For my part, the only way I see the UK holding onto Hong Kong and probably dragging out giving back the NT is if the US and China don’t normalize relations. In which case, China wouldn’t have ‘no shortage of access to hard currency’.
If that’s the only thing that changed then I’d say China would still end up with Hong Kong in the end. It wasn’t just because the time line on their lease was up that the UK ceded back not just the NT but the who of Hong Kong.
I don’t see China just accepting the loss of all of Hong Kong. It’s been a pretty consistent policy in China for the last hundred years that they got screwed over by unfair treaties that were dictated to the weak imperial government by other countries and that the post-imperial governments, whether nationalist or communist, had to overturn the effects of those treaties.
As far as the Chinese government was concerned, foreign enclaves like Hong Kong and Macau should never have existed. So they feel they were showing great forbearance in abiding by the treaty terms and waiting for their return until the treaties expired. There was virtually no chance they would allow those enclaves to exist past the end of the treaties. Doing so would be seen as an admission by the Chinese government to its people that it was too weak to defend China.
In my opinion, any attempt to hold on the New Territories past the end of the treaty would have been seen as an illegal act by China and they would have responded forcibly. An attempt to hold on to Hong Kong Island, where a treaty did grant perpetual rights, might not have resulted in a war (but I wouldn’t rule it out). But China would have done everything it could have, including cutting off HK’s water and other supplies, to force the issue.