An intro to an article about a Hong Kong film director in a magazine I read started off by recounting the tale of an estate agent who looked into loans or mortgages due to be paid off after HK had been handed back to China. This was meant to have kicked off some financial woes of some sort.
The article said no more, being about the director and not the city itself. So I was wondering, was there anything to this lead in to the article?
And as an aside, it was also mentioned that the UK only had to hand over either the land HK was built on and not the city itself. Is there anything to this either? Sadly I don’t have the magazine to hand, but I wanted to post this before I forgot again.
Off the top of my head:
For our purposes HK is comprised essentially of three parts: Hong Kong island, the Kowloon peninsula, and the New Territories, which is a much larger area along the border with the People’s Republic. Britain was leasing the New Territories for 99 years, ending in 1997. The rest it had annexed previously.
However, China officially did not recognize these annexations as legitimate, feeling correctly that they were imposed by an imperialist power. So Beijing wanted all of HK back. It was not interested in renewing the lease on the New Territories. Without the New Territories, Hong Kong’s position as a crown colony was pretty much untenable. So London bowed to the inevitable, gave up all of Hong Kong, and tried to get the best deal it could for the locals, embodied in the Basic Law.
This included a continuation of the economic and social systems in place at the time, for another 50 years. Hence we have the Hong Kong dollar in use there, rather than the Chinese yuan. Likewise, debts and contracts carried over intact, unless there are some arcane exceptions I’m unaware of.
One relevant difference is that legal matters in crown colonies can be appealed up to the House of Lords, much like a legal matter in say, Guam, could be appealed to the US Supreme Court. Now that China exercises sovereignty, interpretation can be sought from the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. However, these occurrences are rare, and in general the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong is the last word.
Although there was some fear and trepidation at the prospect of the Chinese takeover in 1997, the Chinese have by and large kept their hands off the city’s economy.