There would have been a new, militarized border right down a major street of Kowloon. The British government rightly recognized that the remnant would not be viable and that there was no reason to try to hold it as one.
The PLA could easily have overrun the whole thing at any time, it seems. The more interesting question to me is why they never did, or apparently even threatened to.
Because you are thinking of China as it is today, instead of China as it was even in 1997, let alone China as it was in the late Mao or early Deng era. After Nixon’s trip to China and a normalization of relations between China and the US, and after China (mainland) was given the UNSC seat formerly with Taiwan, and after China started to open up to international trade, China began negotiations with the UK for the formal turn over of the NT and all of Hong Kong in, IIRC, the early 80’s sometime…with the US backing the prospect of the UK turning those over to the Chinese. At that point the UK was mainly negotiating to ensure that the CCP would honor it’s one country two systems commitment, so why would China do what you are asking? There was no point and it would have been extremely counterproductive. Before the US/China thawing it would have been impossible and REALLY counterproductive for China to threaten the region under the UK’s authority (as an ally of the US) especially when China and the Soviets had their falling out and no one had China’s back (plus it was embroiled with most of it’s neighbors except North Korea).
China had a reason to play nice in the eighties and nineties. As we’ve noted, the expiration of the treaty only covered the New Territories. China was negotiating (successfully) to have the rest of Hong Kong included in the turnover.
But if the talks had collapsed and Britain declared it was keeping Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, then China would no longer have had a reason to be polite. At that point, the threats would have begun.
Well, that depends. How is this alternative history transpiring? In our actual history you are right…there is no way the UK could or would have decided they were just going to keep the territory unilaterally…even the US supported the turn over. Oh, I suppose the CCP might have told the UK to get stuffed wrt the one nation two policy thingy, but that would be sort of stupid of them. The only way I see how this alternative history works is if the US never approaches China in the 70’s to normalize relations, or maybe that China never has a falling out with the Soviets and so never sees any need to have the US normalize relations. Something along those lines. In which case it would depend on how that played out. Certainly China wouldn’t be even the power it was in the 90’s, especially if the USSR still collapsed and had been supporting China and China’s economy more fully to that time. China, on it’s own and without standing (no UNSC seat, no Soviet Union to bolster it) wouldn’t have been in a position to press the UK for the concession of Hong Kong…and even reacquiring the NT might have been delayed, as the UK might have dragged things out, maybe not even starting negotiations until a few years before instead of in the 80’s.
Let’s blame it on Thatcher. She was opposed to communism in general so let’s say she decides to make a stand on the issue and announces the British government won’t turn over several million of its subjects to communist rule. China protests, the British position hardens, etc.
Apparently back in 1909 the Governor of Hong Kong proposed giving back the port of Weihaiwei to China in exchange for perpetual rule over the New Territories, but it was never pursued (Weihaiwei was returned to Chinese rule in 1930).
In this scenario, nobody backs the UK; the US certainly doesn’t. Once the lease expires, continuing UK occupation of the New Territories is illegal. I doubt that China would start with an invasion, but they are certainly going to mount a range of sanctions and interdictions, building up perhaps to a naval blockade. The US would be embarrassed to support the UK in a flagrant breach of international law, so there would be considerable pressure coming from Washington to encourage the UK to de-escalate and compromise with the PRC.
I wouldn’t completely rule out American support. Reagan was as strongly opposed to communism as Thatcher was; it this became an issue of the free world standing up to communism, he might have backed Britain.
I do agree the big issue would have be the different statuses of the New Territories and Hong Kong Island. Britain would have had no legal right to hold on to the New Territories past 1997. But it did have the legal right to keep Hong Kong Island. So the issue was whether it was practical for them to have tried to do so.
Not to hijack the thread, but how is the “one nation, two systems” thing working out? Can I go to Hong Kong and hold up a sign saying “Communism and Mainland China Sucks!” without getting arrested, beaten or killed? Are the internet filters active on the island?
About as well as you probably think. The CCP has been trying to undermine it for years now…that’s the reason for the umbrella rebellion a few years ago. I wouldn’t recommend going to Hong Kong with such a sign, but as a westerner you’d probably simply be deported, instead of arrested and interrogated, with perhaps you winding up as providing spare parts for rich patrons (especially if you like doing such subversive things as meditation).
There are less internet filters on the island, yes, but the CCP has been making inroads with the local government and this might be changing. One thing to realize is that China isn’t North Korea (which isn’t nearly as isolated wrt information as many seem to think either), and I’d say that most information available in the west is available to most Chinese who wish to pursue it via VPN or via their own code on their own internet.
Without Chinese assent, it would be difficult. As already pointed out, they were dependent on fresh water supplied from the PRC. I’m pretty sure that by this time much of Hong Kong’s electricity was either generated in the New Territories or imported from the PRC; “fortress Hong Kong” would have struggled to keep the lights on. And they would have been almost totally on imports for food, etc. And of course much of Hong Kong’s economic activity was already dependent on sales into the PRC. And the Hong Kong financial sector would pretty much collapse in this scenario.
And, of course, if push really comes to shove Hong Kong is, militarily speaking, indefensible. The Japanese were able to take it in less than a day. Unless the US were willing to go to war with China in order to preserve a totally undemocratic colonial regime in Hong Kong, there was basically nothing to stop the Chinese taking Hong Kong whenever they pleased.
I always thought that that whole situation was, ethically, pretty untenable. Doesn’t the right to govern depend on the consent of the governed? Who cares if the great great grandparents of the people who live there now were subjects of people who signed a treaty with the great great grandparents of other people? If a sufficient supermajority of the actual residents of Hong Kong did not want to be ruled by China, it is a gross abuse of the fundamental purpose of government to go through with the handover.
Granted, I don’t see any reason China would agree with that, or any way to enforce it, but…
Maybe, but Hong Kong had never been organized that way. It was a colony, and not especially autonomous. It didn’t really even have a legislature until 1985, after the handover had been agreed to.
What Lord Feldon said. Hong Kong under British rule was a colony. Government was conducted by appointees of the British government, with the most senior officers sent out from the UK for the purpose. The Governor was accountable to the British government, and took his instructions from them. Only in the last few years of British rule (after they had made a handover agreement with China) were there any elections at all, and they were purely held to appoint “advisory councils”; there was never at any point an elected legislature nor any elected body to which the executive was accountable.
In short, the British government of Hong Kong was not in any way based on the will of the people. It would not have been possible to portray a UK/Chinese standoff over Hong Kong as a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, or as a defence of any principle that the legitimacy of a government flows from the consent of the governed, and any attempt to do so would have been seen as roundly hypocritical.
I read Max as proposing that there ideally should have been a contemporaneous referendum of some kind, to establish the views of the people of HK.
Right. The British had no right to rule Hong Kong without the consent of the governed. And they had no right to hand it over to China without the consent of the governed.
It would have astonished them that their opinions had suddenly started to be of interest after all those years, even if they didn’t matter anymore.
Yes, it would have been seen as pretty hypocritical on the part of the British.
Plus, the Chinese could reasonably have attacked the whole basis of the thing. Why pick on this corner of the country, carved out to suit the colonial interests of a foreign power, and decree that it gets to exercise a right of self-determination on a basis that already presumes it ought to be a distinct entity, making decisions independent of the rest of China? You’re walking yourself into a whole other Northern Ireland situation there; the British are unlikely to make that mistake a second time.
I don’t think the analogy works, really. For one, I think that even today a lot of native Hong Kong people are wary of the CCP and aren’t all that thrilled with them encroaching on their system or putting party hacks into power in the local government. During the transition that was magnified and I think a lot of people would have preferred the Brits they knew to the CCP. Even though Mao was, happily dead by this time it wasn’t the far in the past, and China wasn’t the economic power it would become when the turn over happened. So, it was really nothing like what happened in Ireland.
Oh, I accept that if the UK had held a referendum in Hong Kong, the result might well have been “we don’t want to be governed by the PRC”. (Although, of course, holding a referendum might have opened up awkward questions in other regards, such as “if we are governed by the UK, how come we are denied have the rights of UK citizens?”)
And, yes, the parallel with Northern Ireland is pretty loose. But there is a certain, since the underlying legitimacy of carving out the territory in question from the larger nation of which it is part, and then holding a vote involving only the carved-out territory, is raised. To be honest I think you could make a much stronger case for consulting the people of NI, since NI was carved out precisely because a substantial number of people did not wish to be subject to an Irish government, than you could for according similar treatment for Hong Kong, whose carving-out from China was in no way related to any consideration of the wishes or interests of the locals.
Basically, I think the Chinese would argue that artificial enclaves that are carved out for colonial reasons which ignore historical, social, cultural, ethnic etc boundaries are not nations that have a right of self-determination. Particularly when, as in the case of Hong Kong under the British, they have been governed without any acknowledgement at all of any right of self-determination. They have a right of self-determination only if and when they are thought likely to exercise it in a way that will serve the interests of the UK and its allies? That’s not gonna fly.