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flooded by refugees, where tensions flared up from time to time between the old supporters of the Kuomintang and those of the Communist Party, and where there were serious civil disturbances from time to time most significantly during the 1967 Cultural Revolution riots.
So Hong Kong's future, Hong Kong's destiny, was always bound to that date half-way through 1997 when the 99-year lease on the New Territories runs out, and when China resumes sovereignty over them. That is a fundamental difference from the rest of our Empire story, and that is what makes it unique. When the Union Jack is lowered at midnight on 30 June 1997, we will not be handing Hong Kong over to its own people to run it as an independent community, but we will be handing Hong Kong over to another sovereign power, which promises those people "a high degree of autonomy".
When we started to think about the actual handover ceremony, we went back to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office filing cabinets to see how to manage these affairs, but the files do not help. They do not help because we have never done anything like this before.
So what are our respnsibilities to the people of our last great colony, and what will become of that colony when China is sovereign?
When one looks at Hong Kong today, it is difficult to argue that Britain has discharged its responsibilities badly. Hong Kong is the eighth largest trading economy in the world; if one is allowed to count the European Union as one I am not sure whether that is politically correct it is the fifth largest trading community in the world, with social statistics to match.
What has Britain contributed and on what has the success, 35 years of uninterrupted economic growth, been based? Hong Kong is, I believe, copybook de Tocqueville. What those who govern it have done is to create the conditions in which its largely Chinese population were able to flourish. It has no natural resources except an excellent harbour. At the end of the War, it might have been thought to have every conceivable natural disadvantage. A refuge to hundreds of thousands of men and women escaping from the turbulent history of modern China, from the war with Japan, from the Civil War, from the Communist revolution, from the arrival of Communist economics in Shanghai, from the starvation of millions during the Great Leap Forward, from the Cultural Revolution.
I once had a lunch for a retiring civil servant, and asked his friends, my guests, how they had arrived, each of them, in Hong Kong. One had come with his parents to escape the war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party; one fled, a young man alone, from famine in Canton in the 1950s; one had swum to Hong Kong with his uncle, who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. All had made their mark