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sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong. They

wanted no argument about it. But an argument

is just what they got. They got a very hard

negotiation.

Britain could and should have argued, writes

Monckton, that the people of Hong Kong wished

to remain under the Government of Britain. If

he'd read the September 1984 White Paper he'd

know that that is precisely what we did. But,

to nobody's surprise, we could not persuade

the Chinese to abandon their right even as

we see it under the very same treaty that

created Brit

Britian's

's 99 year lease, to the return

of Hong Kong in 1997. What we did achieve, by

dogged insistence on the need to satisfy the

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