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Many local people became proud of Hong Kong��s hybrid status: its blend of Chinese and Western culture and its emphasis on both traditional Chinese values such as family and education and on modern Western values such as economic freedom and the rule of law. With the establishment of Hong Kong Polytechnic and Chinese University (an amalgamation of three separate schools, New Asia College, Chung Chi College, and United College) in the New Territories, Hong Kong��s population was becoming more educated. By the 1970s, many educated people were taking jobs locally instead of going overseas. Hong Kong had also become more cosmopolitan rather than just Chinese and British. American popular culture, which had been introduced mainly during the 1950s, became even more influential during the 1960s and 1970s, partly through the large numbers of American military personnel who came to Hong Kong during the Vietnam War but mostly through the media. Hollywood films had always had a widespread influence on Hong Kong, but in the 1960s and 1970s a generation of Hong Kong people grew up watching American television programs dubbed into Cantonese. The first McDonald��s restaurant opened in 1975 in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island; by the late 1990s, Hong Kong would have some one hundred McDonald��s restaurants, including four of the world��s busiest branches. And even while some local activists protested Japan��s claims to the Diaoyutai (Senkaku) Islands, eight uninhabited islands located in the East China Sea and claimed by both China and Japan, from the 1970s on things Japanese became more popular, especially as the younger generation had no memory of World War
II. Japanese department stores were popular shopping venues, while children enjoyed watching dubbed Japanese cartoons and science fiction television programs.
From the late 1970s on, Hong Kong and Guangdong became increasingly reintegrated in a symbiotic relationship shaped by Guangdong��s inexpensive labor and land and Hong Kong��s capital and extensive international connections. Hong Kong��s business knowledge and connections in the capitalist world helped China��s economic reforms through investment, finance, and trade. Hong Kong investors poured money into Guangdong and began to open factories there, especially in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone established in 1982. By the late 1980s, more than three million mainlanders were working for Hong Kong firms in Guangdong. China��s economic reforms thus helped transform Hong Kong from a manufacturing base for light industrial goods such as electronics into a leading financial and service center. Whereas in the late 1970s the service sector made up less than 65 percent of Hong Kong��s CDP, by the mid-1990s it accounted for almost 85 percent. By the mid-1990s, some 90 percent of Hong Kong factories had moved to China, with manufacturing counting for less than 10 percent of Hong Kong��s GDP. (This transfer of production to China had a significant socioeconomic impact on Hong Kong. The biggest devaluation of skills was for blue-collar women workers, since men were more able to find work as foremen across the border. Coupled with the emphasis on academic credentials for good jobs in the service sector, this increased income inequalities in Hong Kong.)
As China became more open to the outside world in the late 1970s and early 1980s, visits to the PRC showed Hong Kong people how different Hong Kong was from the mainland. Between 1978 and 1987, Hong Kong residents made more than 30 million trips to Guangdong. Whereas in the past traveling to China meant a long train ride, by the 1980s Hong Kong people could take hydrofoils, direct buses, and airplanes into Guangdong. By 1987, more than 170,000 PRC residents had visited Hong Kong, mainly to see relatives there. Although the new contacts with China made some Hong Kong people feel that they were part of China, they also made many feel that they were a special, even different, kind of Chinese. People came to realize that they could be culturally Chinese without accepting the PRC regime. A 1985 survey showed that three-fifths of Hong Kong��s Chinese population preferred to see themselves as Hong Kongese rather than Chinese. In the 1980s, local academics started to write about Hong Kong��s historical contributions to modern China.
This sense of Hong Kong identity could also be seen in the way activist discourse and campaigns shifted from Chinese nationalism to local community affairs. In the early 1970s, the focus of activism was often on Chinese affairs. For example, college students in Hong Kong started to take a greater interest in Chinese politics and to show their pride in China, which after decades of opposition from the United States had finally been admitted to the United Nations (UN). In 1971, students held an unauthorized demonstration in Victoria Park to protest Japan��s refusal to surrender its claims to the Diaoyutai Islands. University student federations organized trips to China in 1971 and 1972 and a series of ��China Week�� exhibitions in 1973 and were instrumental in the campaign to make Chinese an official language. As Hong Kong��s economy improved and its population became more educated, however, activist groups such as the People��s Council on Public Housing Policy, the Society for Community Organisation, the Christian Industrial Committee, the Hong Kong Professional Teachers�� Union, and the Hong Kong Social Workers General Union demanded more from the government. Thus, in 1976 they organized protests against rent increases in public housing. In 1977 they demanded more participation in public housing policy. In 1980 they organized a protest against increases in bus fares. Many of these groups were organized by the former student activists who had taken such a strong interest in Chinese affairs.
Developments in communications and transportation also helped people to think of themselves as being from one place, Hong Kong, rather than from Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, or the New Territories. The opening of the first cross-harbor tunnel in 1972 brought Hong Kong Island and Kowloon much closer together, as did the Mass Transit Railway (MTR), begun in 1975 and completed by the late 1980s. Fast, clean, and efficient, the mostly underground MTR meets with the Kowloon-Canton Railway, linking Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories. Until the 1950s, the New Territories had remained very much its own part of Hong Kong. Society revolved mainly around agriculture and markets, which were both commercial sites and social gatherings. There were few schools or medical facilities. By the end of the 1960s, however, the pace of life was changing rapidly. The shift in the New Territories during the 1950s from agriculture to industry coincided with Britain��s postwar economic regeneration. Because until 1962 anyone born in the British Commonwealth could settle in Britain, New Territories residents began a pattern of chain migration to Britain, leading to the rise of Chinese restaurants and Hong Kong Chinese communities there and stimulating the New Territories economy through money remitted by these emigrants. After the government decided in 1972 to develop the New Territories to relieve overcrowding in Hong Kong and Kowloon, the ��new town�� projects helped change the character of the New Territories by bringing in residents from other parts of the colony and blurring the line between rural and urban.
From a colonial perspective, Hong Kong had also become its own place with its own administrative identity, enjoying a wide degree of political and economic autonomy. After the budget surplus of the 1947�V1948 fiscal year, Britain surrendered its tight budgetary supervision over Hong Kong. By the early 1950s, the British government had given Hong Kong a considerable level of administrative and financial autonomy. After the British government stopped reviewing Hong Kong��s annual budget in the late 1950s during the tenure of Governor Robert Black, the colony became free to set its own tax policies and forge its own housing and social welfare programs. In the 1960s and 1970s the colonial administration won the right to set its own commercial policies and exchange rate and to handle its own foreign reserves. While this autonomy frequently enabled the colonial government to evade the British government��s orders and guidelines for decolonization and political reform, it enabled Hong Kong to function as its own administrative and economic entity. The colony participated independently in a variety of international organizations and maintained trade development offices in all major cities. (The British government retained the right, however, to overrule in matters such as capital punishment, as it did in 1973 when Murray MacLehose refused to pardon an offender sentenced to death. Hong Kong��s last execution occurred in 1966, although capital punishment remained on the books until 1991.) The British government had historically shown little interest in Hong Kong, and as Britain��s diplomatic and economic relations with China took precedence over its concerns about Hong Kong, colonial officials and British businessmen found themselves increasingly both isolated from the British government and defensive about Hong Kong��s status.

IDENTITY THROUGH CREDIBILITY: THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION
As it had in earlier decades, the colonial government played an important role in shaping this sense of Hong Kong identity. In the 1970s, for example, the government responded to the increased interest in Chinese affairs by trying to cultivate a Hong Kong identity through such events as the Hong Kong Festival and the Keep Hong Kong Clean Campaign and by encouraging consumerism as a contrast to the Socialism in China. This local identity was reinforced by the government��s toughened policies toward Chinese illegal immigrants, often smuggled into Hong Kong by boat owners known as snake heads. In October 1980, Governor MacLehose announced that the government��s ��touch base�� policy would be ended. Whereas since 1950 the government had allowed illegal immigrants who had joined their families or found gainful employment to stay in Hong Kong, captured illegal immigrants would now be repatriated. The old policy, the governor explained, had become a ��tragic charade�� in which the illegal immigrants had ��little to lose and everything to gain by running the gauntlet of Chinese and Hong Kong forces.�� Reflecting popular local sentiments, MacLehose argued that these illegal immigrants strained housing, medical facilities, education, and social welfare and were responsible for crime ��out of all proportion to their numbers.��2 These crackdowns on illegal immigrants clearly distinguished Hong Kong Chinese, reminding them that they had special rights and privileges unavailable to Chinese on the mainland.
The colonial government��s efforts to create a local identity could not have succeeded had it not achieved a remarkable level of political credibility by tackling one of Hong Kong��s most serious problems: corruption. More than any of his other reforms, Governor MacLehose is best known for his fight against government corruption. According to Elsie Tu, who spent decades uncovering government corruption and other abuses, MacLehose ��would not close his eyes to corruption as his predecessors had.�� Having tried for so long to show how corruption was ��making a mockery of the rule of law�� but succeeding in gaining ��only trouble�� for herself, Tu concludes that ��without Governor MacLehose it is certain that corruption would have continued, because the law enforcement body, the police, were themselves corrupt, making it impossible to take legal action against that heinous crime that was destroying our community.��3 Leo Goodstadt, who has spent many years working in Hong Kong and writing about the region, is less impressed by MacLehose��s efforts to end corruption. According to Goodstadt, the governor refused to listen to senior police officers who tried to complain about police corruption because he ��did not want integrity to become a public issue for fear of tarnishing the new, positive image he was anxious to create for the colonial administration.��4

Despite their differing attitudes toward MacLehose, these two veterans of Hong Kong��s political scene help us understand why corruption was such a problem in Hong Kong and why controlling it ultimately became such a test of the government��s credibility. Colonial officials often blamed the prevalence of corruption on the Chinese community, insisting that corruption was so deeply ingrained in Chinese culture that it could never be curbed, let alone eradicated, and that ��the British themselves were largely untainted.��5 But the number of expatriates later convicted of corruption once the government finally tried to tackle the problem proves that there was nothing particularly Chinese about corruption. For Tu, the root of the evil lay in the lack of representation in the legislature, which created ��many opportunities for corruption and malpractice in the civil service.��6
Similarly, Goodstadt blames the problem on the ��uneasy partnership�� between the colonial government and the local British and Chinese business elite, which ��created an environment in which the dishonest and the venal found it easy to flourish in both the public and private sectors.��7

It is somewhat difficult to blame the prevalence of corruption entirely on colonialism and the lack of political representation, for democratic governments can also be corrupt. Regardless, corruption had been a way of life since the founding of colonial Hong Kong but became especially prevalent and highly institutionalized after World War II. Still, most colonial authorities assumed that it was confined mainly to low-ranking Chinese officials and police officers. Despite evidence of extensive corruption in the mid-1950s that led to the formation of the Advisory Committee on Corruption in 1958, Goodstadt argues that Governor Grantham��s measures to tackle the problem were ��feeble�� and ��merely token measures.��8 Corruption became a serious political issue after the Star Ferry riots of 1966. Although the colonial government downplayed the situation in the official published report, senior officials privately were more concerned and sent a mission to Singapore to study how that former British colony had cracked down on corruption. But even though the 1966 riots had raised concerns about corruption in the police force and other parts of government, the police force��s performance in the 1967 disturbances improved its reputation ��dramatically�� and made the Hong Kong public ready to ��overlook conduct that would have been unacceptable in less troubled times.��9

By the early 1970s, corruption permeated the Hong Kong government, from senior officials down to police officers who were deeply involved in syndicated corruption and firemen who refused to turn on their hoses until they received their ��water money.�� But even when the ��general public was bitterly resentful about the endless extortion it experienced in its daily contacts with government departments,�� writes Goodstadt, colonial officials ��dismissed its complaints as malicious or exaggerated.��10 The case of Peter Godber, however, embarrassed the government in such a way that MacLehose could no longer ignore the problem. In April 1973, the commissioner of police learned that Godber, a chief superintendent of police who had been decorated for his courage in the 1967 riots and had been promoted to second-in-command of the Kowloon police in 1971, was sending large sums of money outside of Hong Kong. An investigation by the Anti-Corruption Branch of the Criminal Investigation Department revealed that Godber��s resources were six times his salary from the previous twenty years. But Godber was able to use his government connections to evade security checks at the airport and escape, first to Singapore and then to Britain, where he knew he could not be extradited to Hong Kong. The scandal was widely publicized in the local and British media. Local activists quickly organized a ��Fight Corruption, Catch Godber�� campaign, which further humiliated the government by holding large public demonstrations against corruption.
After Godber��s highly publicized escape, MacLehose appointed High Court judge Alistair Blair-Kerr to run an inquiry. Blair-Kerr��s report ��portrayed a deeply-corrupt police force and a government riddled with dishonesty in almost every department.��11 In 1974, MacLehose established the Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC) led by Jack Cater, who had first come to Hong Kong right after World War II in the interim military administration and then returned in 1967 as defense secretary, and John Prendergast, an intelligence officer who had previously served in Palestine, the Gold Coast, Egypt, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden. Cater ��launched a campaign against corruption of almost evangelical fervour.��12
Although the commission was initially greeted with cynicism, its success in extraditing Godber in 1975 showed that it meant business. Godber, notes Tu, ��had given the game away, served a prison term, and unintentionally set the wheels of justice against corruption in motion.��13

The ICAC now faced another problem. So many police officers were arrested that police morale plummeted, and lower-ranking officers complained that the ICAC was using convicted policemen and other criminals to obtain evidence. In October 1977, several thousand police officers marched on the police commissioner��s office. Some of the protesting officers then marched on the ICAC headquarters, breaking into the building and injuring several ICAC officers. Fearing that the police might go on strike and plunge the colony into anarchy, on November 5 MacLehose issued a partial amnesty for corruption committed before January 1, 1977, except for extremely grave cases. Although many people were shocked and dismayed that the governor would yield, there would have been no way to replace Hong Kong��s large police force on such short notice without calling in the military. As MacLehose later recalled, ��it would have been feasible to go on prosecuting people for offences committed long ago, but the risk of such prosecutions had resulted in an alliance between the formerly corrupt and the presently corrupt which was the heart of the near mutiny of the police. The amnesty split off these two rather different elements and simplified the ICAC��s ability to press on with the prosecution of current corruption.��14

The 1977 crisis carved a deep rift between the police and the ICAC that would not be bridged until the mid-1980s. The ICAC also lost a considerable degree of face, although it was eventually able to regain public confidence. Other problems remained unresolved. For example, the ICAC often seemed less willing to prosecute British civil servants. It also lacked control over triad gangs, who often served as middlemen for corrupt civil servants, especially among the police force. As Goodstadt argues, ��criminal proceedings against police officers and the more flamboyant nature of police corruption distracted public attention from the far more lucrative and better-organized conspiracies in the business world.�� Corruption was especially rife in the property and construction businesses. With fire and safety restrictions to be avoided, ��scandals in the property sector and the construction industry plagued the rest of British rule and continued under the post-colonial administration.�� And although the ICAC exposed ��a small number of senior officials and some minor business and professional persons,�� some government officials ��continued to maintain close social connections with business and professional circles they were supposed to oversee, unintimidated by the ICAC��s public criticisms of such behaviour.��15

Given Hong Kong��s deep-rooted and widespread corruption, however, the establishment of the ICAC and the fight against corruption in the 1970s was a remarkable feat. ��Almost overnight,�� writes Goodstadt, ��the principle of honest administration had become part of the civil service culture. The community now looked to a professional organization ... to police the colonial administration and enforce zero tolerance of corruption.�� The establishment of the ICAC did more than help the government tackle corruption. As Goodstadt argues, it ��generated invaluable political dividends for British rule.�� The Hong Kong public ��became convinced almost at once that, at last, the British had established an agency to which it could complain, fearlessly and effectively, about abuse of office, dereliction of duty, and the unlawful exactions of officialdom. At a stroke, the ICAC encountered deep-rooted cynicism about the colonial administration and its sense of duty towards the population at large. In a colonial and non-democratic political environment, that change of image was an invaluable source of credibility.��16


NEGOTIATING HONG KONG��S FUTURE
Looming over the changes and developments in the 1970s was the question of Hong Kong��s future political status. Since coming to power in 1949, the Chinese government had generally left Hong Kong alone, rarely even discussing its political status. Hong Kong had played an important role in the Chinese economy in the 1960s and 1970s. After the disastrous Great Leap Forward and through the Cultural Revolution, foreign currency acquired through colonial Hong Kong financed much of the PRC��s imports. In the 1960s, the PRC earned almost half of its hard currency from selling food and water to Hong Kong. Journalist Richard Hughes described Hong Kong as ��China��s only rewarding bridgehead with the rest of the world and China��s most convenient springboard for export dumping forays into South East Asia.�� Through Hong Kong, the PRC was flooding markets with bicycles, canned goods, clothing, radios, and sewing machines that cost half as much as their Japanese equivalents. In Hong Kong, the PRC government ran more than fifty department stores, the Bank of China and eight smaller banks, two insurance companies, three financial syndicates, and ��a Maoist flush of shoe stores, publishing houses and restaurants.��17 Whereas Hong Kong was better known as a British and American listening post on China, it served a similar function for Chinese Communist Party cadres and activists, who used the colony to stay in touch with the outside world. Not surprisingly, PRC leaders realized Hong Kong��s economic and political value and were eager to continue the pragmatic relationship with the colonial administration that had been built in the 1950s.
After the PRC was finally admitted to the UN in November 1971, however, in March 1972 Huang Hua, China��s ambassador to the UN, clarified Hong Kong��s political status as ��a Chinese territory under British administration�� and asked that Hong Kong and Macau be removed from the UN��s list of colonial territories. Huang insisted that Hong Kong was an internal Chinese matter, to be solved by the Chinese government ��in an appropriate way when conditions are ripe.�� When on November 2, 1972, the UN General Assembly removed Hong Kong and Macau from its list of colonial territories, Britain, which had not objected to Huang��s declaration, ended its practice of sending annual reports on Hong Kong to the UN secretary-general. In a language shift designed to reflect this change and to suit both the British and the Chinese governments, Hong Kong changed from a Crown Colony to a Dependent Territory (although the word ��Colony�� remained on banknotes until 1985), while the colonial secretary became the chief secretary. As a gesture of goodwill to the PRC government, in 1973 the British government persuaded the Hong Kong government to release the last of the prisoners from the 1967 riots.
Not only had Huang Hua insisted that Hong Kong��s future political status would be determined by China rather than Britain, he had also implied that the people of Hong Kong would not have a role in this process. But many people in Hong Kong took Huang��s declaration as little more than official rhetoric, assuming that the PRC would continue its traditional practice of leaving Hong Kong alone. The economic boom of the 1970s led some people in Hong Kong to hope that China would simply let Hong Kong be, especially since it had so much to gain from the colony��s continued economic prosperity. And when the PRC government turned down Portugal��s offer in 1974 to return Macau, many people in Hong Kong took this as a sign of hope that China might be willing to do the same for Hong Kong. When Queen Elizabeth visited Hong Kong in May 1975 as the first reigning British sovereign to do so, she was welcomed by thousands of well-wishers. In September 1978, a senior official at the Hong Kong branch of the New China News Agency admitted that the 1967 riots were a mistake and that China should learn from Hong Kong and from other industrializing countries.
Some Hong Kong investors, however, grew concerned about taking out new leases since the government could not grant any leases beyond the 1997 deadline. In 1976, Jimmy McGregor, director of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, warned that investors would need assurances from the PRC government before making long-term investments in Hong Kong. When in March 1979 the PRC government invited MacLehose to Beijing on an official visit, the governor saw the first official visit to the PRC by a sitting governor as a chance to discuss the expiration of the New Territories lease. In his meeting with new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, MacLehose suggested that the Legislative Council unilaterally set aside the 1997 deadline without making any permanent claims to the territory. Although Deng rejected this suggestion, MacLehose returned to Hong Kong relieved and optimistic. Choosing his words carefully, he explained to the Hong Kong public that while Deng had maintained that China would eventually resolve the Hong Kong issue, he had also assured the governor that Hong Kong investors could ��set their hearts at ease.�� MacLehose did not tell the Hong Kong public that Deng had rejected the proposal to set aside the 1997 deadline.
No one knows exactly when the PRC government decided that it would retake Hong Kong. Journalist Kevin Rafferty believes that Deng told MacLehose during his trip to Beijing that China would recover Hong Kong in 1997. Rafferty notes that the passing of the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act of 1981, which demoted more than 2.5 million Hong Kong Chinese entitled to carry British passports to ��British Dependent Territory citizens�� and excluded them from right of abode in Britain, implies that the British government knew that 1997 would see the end of British Hong Kong.18 Although the unofficial members of the Legislative and Executive Councils had wanted to send a delegation to London to lobby the British Parliament against voting for the bill, MacLehose told them to cancel the trip. (The unofficial members may well have succeeded, for the bill passed by only three votes.)
In any case, MacLehose��s visit to Beijing created a temporary sense of relief in Hong Kong. The stock market and property markets rose, and foreign banks and businesses poured into Hong Kong even while land in Hong Kong became the most expensive in the world. Hong Kong people were impressed by China��s economic modernization and Deng��s policy of opening China to the outside world. This optimism began to wane by 1982. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was planning a trip to Asia in September that would include China, where she would surely have to broach the subject of Hong Kong. There were other ominous signs. The Chinese National People��s Congress, the PRC��s highest legislative body, had drafted provisions for a Special Administration Region (SAR) the previous year. In January 1982, Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang told British lord privy seal Humphrey Atkins that the PRC had already made provisions for Hong Kong after 1997. In July, senior PRC official Peng Zhen spoke of the reunification of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as SARs. Although some scholars believe that Thatcher never actually thought a settlement might be reached for retaining Hong Kong, when the prime minister arrived in Beijing on September 22, fresh from Britain��s victory against Argentina in the Falkland Islands, she at least appeared as if she thought she had a chance to keep Hong Kong because of the treaties ceding Hong Kong and Kowloon. Thatcher insisted that the Sino-British treaties could only be altered, not abrogated, and that Britain had a moral obligation to the people of Hong Kong, but PRC officials declared that the treaties were unequal and had been signed with the long-defunct Qing government.
By the time Thatcher left Beijing, it was clear that China would try to recover Hong Kong in 1997. Deng Xiaoping did, however, assure Thatcher that Hong Kong people could rule Hong Kong after China resumed control. Shortly thereafter, prominent Hong Kong people were invited to visit Beijing, where they were welcomed by PRC leaders. Still, public confidence in Hong Kong��s post-1997 future dropped so far that it caused panic in Hong Kong��s financial markets and a collapse in the property market. The sharp decrease in investor confidence led to Hong Kong��s slowest growth in GDP since 1975. In September 1983, the plunging Hong Kong dollar was pegged to the American dollar, which restored some self-assurance. But much of this confidence was undermined in March 1984 when one of the oldest and largest British firms in Hong Kong, Jardine and Matheson, which only one year earlier the PRC government had praised for helping to develop China��s international trade, declared that it would move its legal domicile from Hong Kong to Bermuda in order to protect its ability to function under English law after 1997.
For China, recovering Hong Kong was a way to end the unequal treaties and to reclaim face and honor. For Deng Xiaoping in particular, who saw Hong Kong as part of a larger reunification that included Taiwan and Macau, it was a way to show Taiwan that the one country, two systems mode!�Xoriginally meant to apply to Taiwan rather than Hong Kong�X could work. As China��s economy became more open in the late 1980s, it became more plausible to think of Hong Kong as part of China rather than as a source of spiritual pollution. Whereas earlier Chinese leaders had been content to benefit from Hong Kong being under British rule, Deng, who took a deep personal interest and leadership role in the recovery of Hong Kong, now believed that the PRC could have sovereignty over Hong Kong and could benefit from it economically (hence his call for mainland industries to invest in Hong Kong). And the fact that the PRC had tolerated Hong Kong��s colonial status for so long meant that it would inherit a much richer prize in 1997.
Could the British have played their cards any differently? The suggestion from some quarters in Britain to return the New Territories but retain Hong Kong Island and Kowloon would have neither worked nor satisfied the Chinese government. The British might have argued that by international law the 1842 and 1860 treaties were still valid. But by now Britain, which had long ceased to be an imperial power, was neither interested in nor capable of defending Hong Kong from China, where it had larger diplomatic and commercial interests to pursue. By the early 1960s, British investment in Hong Kong had dropped to less than half of what it had been in the early 1930s. In 1967 the British Treasury concluded that Hong Kong was no longer an economic asset for Britain. Nor could Britain have resisted China militarily. British planners had realized by the late 1950s that Hong Kong could not be defended from an attack by China. The Naval Dockyard was closed down in 1958, and shortly afterward the local garrison was pared down to the minimum needed for internal security. In 1968 the British government announced that it would withdraw all British troops east of Suez by the end of 1971. In the same year, the Colonial Office became part of the Commonwealth Office, which in 1971 was subsumed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. From then on, British strategy was simply to hold off for as long as possible any PRC attempts to recover Hong Kong.

THE SINO-BRITISH NEGOTIATIONS AND THE JOINT DECLARATION
MacLehose��s successor, Edward Youde, arrived in Hong Kong in May 1982 during a period of great anxiety. According to an opinion poll conducted in May and June, the majority of Hong Kong��s population preferred the continuation of British rule, even though the British Nationality Act of 1981 had provoked a sense of betrayal. The British government nevertheless saw in Youde someone who could work out a suitable agreement with the PRC. A career diplomat who had once been ambassador to Beijing and was fluent in Mandarin, Youde had negotiated with the Chinese Communists in 1949 for the release of the HMS Amethyst.
The Sino-British negotiations on Hong Kong��s future took two years. The first round of negotiations, from October 1982 to June 1983, were conducted mainly between the British ambassador to China, Richard Evans, and the Chinese foreign ministry. The chief bone of contention was China��s demand that the British acknowledge Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong, which Britain refused. Only after Margaret Thatcher conceded that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese sovereignty, on the condition that the people of Hong Kong accept the reversion, did the negotiations move on to the second stage. Another problem was that the two sides had very different views of what the final product would look like. As David Wilson, former political advisor to the Hong Kong government (he had accompanied MacLehose to Bejing in 1979) and member of the British negotiating team, recalled, ��We had wanted to write a book�Xwhich would have looked rather like the Encyclopaedia Britannica �Xwhile the Chinese wanted about two or three sides of A4 paper.��19

The second phase of negotiations began in July 1983. The Chinese negotiating team was led by Vice Foreign Minister Yao Gang, who was later replaced by Assistant Foreign Minister Zhou Nan. The British side was led by former ambassador to China Percy Cradock, although he was replaced by Ambassador Richard Evans in late 1983. Governor Youde participated in the negotiations, but the Chinese insisted that he be present only as a member of the British delegation; the official PRC line was that the negotiations were solely between Britain and China, which represented the people of Hong Kong. Although public opinion in Hong Kong overwhelmingly opposed a return to Chinese rule (a point that Xu Jiatun, the PRC��s de facto representative in Hong Kong as director of the New China News Agency local branch, realized all too well), Deng Xiaoping believed otherwise. In late 1983, Deng warned that unless the negotiations were completed by October 1 (the PRC��s national day) in 1984, the Chinese would make a unilateral declaration.
The main obstacle to the second phase of negotiations was Britain��s hope to continue administering Hong Kong after 1997, even under Chinese sovereignty. Cradock later claimed that Deng Xiaoping was determined to recover Hong Kong fully, ��even if it meant taking it back as a barren rock.��20 As it became clear that the Chinese were insistent on recovering Hong Kong, in late 1983 the British shifted their emphasis to maintaining stability in Hong Kong after the transfer to Chinese sovereignty, and in April 1984 Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe regretfully informed the Legislative Council that it would be unrealistic to continue British rule after 1997. Another obstacle arose when the Chinese suggested appointing a joint commission to manage the transition. Convinced that this arrangement would fail, Governor Youde instead suggested a Sino-British Joint Liaison Group that would be strictly consultative. (This Joint Liaison Group was established in Hong Kong shortly after the end of the negotiations; the British side of the group was led by David Wilson, who would return to Hong Kong as governor in 1987.)
Signed by Thatcher and Premier Zhao Ziyang on December 19, 1984, and ratified on May 28, 1985, the Sino-British Joint Declaration laid out the main terms of the agreement regarding Hong Kong��s future political status. All of Hong Kong would revert to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997. Britain would administer Hong Kong until then and would help maintain its economic prosperity and social stability; the PRC would cooperate in this process. Hong Kong would become an SAR with a high level of autonomy, except in defense and foreign affairs. Hong Kong��s social and economic systems would remain unchanged, as would most of its current laws. The Hong Kong government would retain control over trade policies and trading agreements. Hong Kong would remain a free port, with no taxes paid to China. The rights and freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion would be preserved. Troops of the Chinese People��s Liberation Army troops stationed in Hong Kong would not interfere in internal SAR affairs. This one country, two systems arrangement�Xwhich Thatcher described as ��an ingenious idea�� and Deng Xiaoping called ��a product of dialectical Marxism and historical materialism���Xwould last for fifty years after 1997.
Local reactions to the Joint Declaration were mixed. Opinion polls showed that most people preferred that Hong Kong remain a British colony, but most people had come to accept that this was not a reality. Although some feared the prospect of living under Chinese rule, they were glad that a deal had finally been struck. While most Chinese leaders had pushed the British to try to hold on to Hong Kong, they quickly turned their attention to China once the deal was finished. Some took Chinese citizenship and gave up their British awards and titles, but this was not always enough for Beijing. In June 1984, Q. W. Lee, Lydia Dunn, and Sze-yuen Chung�Xall senior members of the Executive Council�Xwere invited to visit Beijing. The leader of the delegation, Chung, who had been knighted twice by the British and had originally argued for continued British administration of Hong Kong, was chastised by Deng Xiaoping for questioning China��s ability to adhere to the one country, two systems model.
For the PRC government, the Joint Declaration was a way to prepare Hong Kong for reunification as smoothly as possible and to assure Hong Kong people that their way of life would not change. Still, many people in Hong Kong were frustrated, and they resented the way that the negotiations had been conducted, without their having any say in the process. These feelings were captured brilliantly by Zunzi, a political cartoonist for a leading local Chinese newspaper, in a cartoon depicting Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping as parents and Hong Kong as a girl about to marry a roll of paper held by an anonymous, headless man. The roll of paper represented the Joint Declaration, with the cartoon suggesting that Hong Kong��s return to China was like a traditional Chinese arranged marriage in which the bride had no say. This sense of frustration and resentment helps explain the blossoming of new political groups in the early 1980s, such as the Hong Kong Prospect Institute, the New Hong Kong Society, Meeting Point, the Hong Kong Forum, the Hong Kong Affairs Society, the Hong Kong People��s Association, the Association for Democracy and Justice, and the Hong Kong Policy Viewers. Although they represented a spectrum of political opinions, these groups had several common traits. They were generally organized by former student activists who were now service professionals with strong links to the grassroots through their jobs. Strongly committed to nationalism, democracy, and welfare capitalism, these groups used legal channels such as public seminars, news conferences, and position papers to broadcast their goals.
For the British, the Joint Declaration was an attempt to protect Hong Kong after 1997 and to withdraw with dignity and without appearing as if they had surrendered Hong Kong and betrayed its people. (Cradock called the declaration ��as comprehensive protection as could be devised and agreed.��)21 This helps explain why the British made minor and belated attempts to introduce democracy to Hong Kong during the Sino-British negotiations, not only to protect Hong Kong under Chinese rule but also to make the transfer to Chinese rule more palatable to the British Parliament. In July 1984 the Hong Kong government published a consultation green paper on political reform, explaining its intention to ��develop progressively a system of government the authority for which is firmly rooted in Hong Kong, which is able to represent authoritatively the views of the people of Hong Kong, and which is more directly accountable to the people of Hong Kong.�� The plans for reform included an indirectly elected part of the Legislative Council. Although the government did not commit to direct elections, in November 1984 it published a policy white paper conceding that ��the bulk of public response from all sources suggested a cautious approach with a gradual start by introducing a very small number of directly elected members in 1988 and building up to a significant number of directly elected members by 1997.��
The PRC proceeded with the Joint Declaration without complaint. But in 1985 Xu Jiatun, the PRC��s representative in Hong Kong, accused the British of violating the Joint Declaration and trying to run Hong Kong after 1997. As a compromise, the British agreed on no major reforms until after the promulgation of the Basic Law in 1990. Although in 1985 the Legislative Council was expanded by twenty-four elected members (and then to twenty-six in 1988), elected members still accounted for only 40 percent of the total membership. None were directly elected; rather, half were selected by functional constituencies, while the other half came from twelve electoral colleges whose members were from the lower councils. On September 26, 1985, the first indirect elections were held for twelve functional constituency seats and twelve district seats for the Legislative Council (consisting of fifty-seven seats). Until then, the last significant constitutional development had been in 1896, when two unofficial members were added to the Executive Council. Although both the Legislative Council and the Executive Council had increased in size and Chinese members had been added to each, the overall structure of the government had not changed, nor had the relationships among the governor, the two councils, and the civil service.

JITTERY CITY
Designed by renowned British architect Norman Foster, the new headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank�Xlong a symbol of Hong Kong��s colonial status�Xwas the world��s most expensive building when it was completed in 1985. Bank and government officials hoped that the new building would convey confidence in Hong Kong��s future. And although many foreign firms left Hong Kong in anticipation of the 1997 transition, even more came to take advantage of the economic opportunities provided by Hong Kong��s reintegration with China. The Hong Kong government appeared to have survived the Sino-British negotiations remarkably well. In surveys taken in 1985, less than 32 percent of respondents said that they trusted the PRC government, while more than 73 percent said that they trusted the Hong Kong government.
In May 1986, however, the cover of the locally based Far Eastern Economic Review described Hong Kong as a ��jittery city.�� After the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in April of that year, people in Hong Kong became concerned about China��s plans to build a nuclear power station at Daya (Bias) Bay, about thirty miles northeast of Hong Kong. The site had been chosen in 1982, and while the British, Chinese, and Hong Kong governments all supported the project, which was to be built by a French company, pressure groups such as the Joint Organization for the Concern of Nuclear Energy and the Friends of the Earth lobbied hard against it. After the Chernobyl disaster, surveys showed that 77 percent of Hong Kong people opposed the project. More than one million Hong Kong people signed a petition against it (although most people lost interest once the Chinese government decided to go ahead with the plan).
This sense of fear and uncertainty was intensified when on December 5, 1986, Governor Youde died of a heart attack in his sleep at the British embassy in Beijing, becoming the first Hong Kong governor to die in office. When his body was returned to Hong Kong for the funeral and cremation, huge crowds came out to pay their respects to the governor who had fought for Hong Kong in the Sino-British negotiations even while not being allowed to represent Hong Kong officially. The late governor was replaced temporarily by Chief Secretary David Akers-Jones, who served as acting governor from December 1986 until April 1987, when David Wilson, the former political advisor and China scholar, arrived in Hong Kong to take governorship.
While some people in Hong Kong reacted to this uncertainty by taking a stronger interest in local politics, others responded by voting with their feet. People had been emigrating from Hong Kong (mainly to Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States) before and throughout the Sino-British negotiations, but the scale and intensity of emigration increased dramatically after the Joint Declaration, when Hong Kong saw a ��gathering wave of emigration.�� 22 Whereas some twenty thousand people left every year from 1980 to 1986, according to government figures the number rose to almost thirty thousand in 1987 and forty thousand in 1989. These figures are even more significant given that they represent only the people who were actually able to find host countries willing to accept them rather than those who wanted or tried to emigrate. Although Governor Wilson denied that Hong Kong was experiencing a brain drain, most of these emigrants were educated, bilingual, middle-class professionals with British passports who, denied the right of abode in Britain after the 1981 British Nationality Act, looked elsewhere for havens before the transition to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
Desperate to maintain public confidence, in May 1987 the Hong Kong government published a consultation green paper on representative government and established a survey office to track public opinion. The green paper invited the Hong Kong public to choose from four options, including direct elections to the Legislative Council. However, the options were presented in such a way that the issue of direct elections was obscured (the paper did not simply ask whether respondents favored direct elections). When in October the survey office released its findings showing that the majority of the population did not favor direct elections, even though independent surveys showed that the overwhelming majority of people in Hong Kong favored direct elections in 1988, the local reaction was ��extremely hostile.��23 Critics accused the government of manipulating the survey to postpone democratic reform. Martin Lee, a lawyer and Legislative Council member, led the Delegation for Democracy and flew to London in January 1988 in an unsuccessful bid to persuade British government officials and members of Parliament to support direct elections. In February 1988, the Hong Kong government published a policy white paper, which explained that because there was no ��clear consensus,�� direct elections would be postponed until 1991. Instead, indirect elections were held in September 1988 for twenty-six seats in the fifty-seven-member Legislative Council. The Hong Kong and British governments had caved to pressure from the Chinese government not to introduce democratic reforms by claiming that the people of Hong Kong did not want them�Xand the people of Hong Kong knew it, which made them view all three governments negatively.

THE BASIC LAW
Almost immediately after the Joint Declaration had been ratified, the Chinese side began to work on drafting the Basic Law. While it was supposed to codify the guarantees made by China in the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law was also a chance to ensure that any political changes in Hong Kong before 1997 would comply with what China had in mind for Hong Kong after 1997. But the drafting of the Basic Law also showed the inherent weaknesses in the Joint Declaration�Xmany of them areas that had been left vague because the Sino-British negotiators had been unable to agree. These vague areas for the most part enabled Britain and China to interpret the terms of the declaration in their own ways. As political scientist James Tang argues, the Joint Declaration did not settle the Sino-British differences; rather, it became ��the source of these differences.��24

The main bone of contention was the pace and scope of institutional change in Hong Kong before 1997. The Joint Declaration specified that the ��current�� institutions of Hong Kong were to remain unchanged for fifty years, but it gave no definition of ��current.�� The Chinese government argued that Hong Kong should return to China as it stood in 1984, when the joint agreement was signed, but the British and Hong Kong governments insisted that Hong Kong could not be frozen in time for thirteen years. The Chinese government viewed any efforts to introduce political, institutional, or legislative changes as attempts to maintain a British presence after 1997. Britain and China had agreed that by 1997 the Legislative Council would be ��constituted by elections,�� but Britain and China interpreted this differently. The Chinese government firmly opposed any suggestions of universal suffrage, especially since the British had waited so long in their rule even to consider this. In 1985 Xu Jiatun declared that ��consultation�� constituted a form of election. Although the British had insisted that the Joint Declaration should specify that Hong Kong��s legislature would be ��constituted by election,�� the Chinese later claimed that they were unaware of the ramifications of the British definition of the term ��election.�� However, the British had proposed modest reforms in 1984, even before the end of the Sino-British negotiations, including indirect elections to the Legislative Council in 1985 (although these elections did not take place).
The Basic Law took almost five years to draft. On July 1, 1985, the National People��s Congress established the Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee, which consisted of 59 appointed members (36 from the mainland and 23 from Hong Kong) and held its first plenum that week in Beijing. On September 18, the Basic Law Consultative Committee was established in Hong Kong, consisting of 180 appointed members, all local residents. In early 1986, Timothy Renton, the British Foreign Office minister for Hong Kong, announced his government��s policy of convergence, meaning that Britain would consult with China on all matters pertinent to the 1997 transition and that no political reforms would be made until after the publication of the Basic Law in 1990. In fact, Britain and China had made a secret agreement in late 1985 to delay any major constitutional reforms until 1991. Although Britain later argued that this arrangement forced the Chinese government to agree to more extensive political reforms in 1991 than it would have otherwise allowed, the policy of convergence was seen by many people in Hong Kong as a capitulation to the Chinese government and seriously hurt the Hong Kong government��s image. The policy of convergence received symbolic approval when Queen Elizabeth visited Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and, finally Hong Kong in October 1986.
Released in late April 1988 for a five-month public consultation, the first draft of the Basic Law provoked a storm of criticism in Hong Kong. Almost seventy-five thousand submissions were received over the consultation period. The amended second draft, released in late February 1989, also received a great deal of criticism during the eight-month consultation period, mainly from liberal groups but even from moderate and conservative groups, for not allowing more room for representative government. The drafting process was also disrupted after the student protests in Beijing that culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June 1989. Two members of the drafting committee�XLouis Cha, a publisher, and Peter Kwong, the Anglican bishop�Xresigned after the PRC government imposed martial law on May 20. The PRC excluded from the drafting committee Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, the two most vocal advocates of democratization on the committee and the founders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China.
The British government tried to persuade the PRC to modify some of the clauses, including those enabling the PRC to station troops in Hong Kong and to declare a state of emergency, but instead the PRC added a new clause: Article 23, which allowed the future HKSAR to prohibit subversion against the PRC government. After meeting in January to amend the law, in February 1990 the drafting committee held its ninth and final plenum in Beijing, where it adopted its final draft. In accordance with a secret deal made by British and Chinese officials in January-February in Beijing, the new final draft included an amendment calling for eighteen directly elected Legislative Council seats in 1991 and twenty in 1995. The British government later justified this secret deal by insisting that the compromise ensured that the Chinese would allow the new constitutional arrangement to last beyond 1997. On April 4, 1990, the National People��s Congress formally enacted the Basic Law, which was then promulgated by the PRC government.
Most people in Hong Kong understood that while the Basic Law was the PRC government��s attempt to show Hong Kong people that it was sincere about the one country, two systems model, it was also the government��s way to show that it was in charge of Hong Kong��s post-1997 future. As Hong Kong��s miniconstitution, the Basic Law promises a ��high level of autonomy.�� It makes Beijing responsible for Hong Kong��s foreign policy and defense but allows Hong Kong to participate independently in international organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the Olympics. Although both the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law guarantee that Hong Kong��s legal and judicial systems will not be changed, the Standing Committee of the National People��s Congress has the ultimate authority to interpret and amend the Basic Law and to revoke any Hong Kong law that it feels violates the Basic Law.

THE END OF THE KOWLOON WALLED CITY
The tensions permeating the Sino-British negotiations and the drafting of the Basic Law would escalate after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June 1989 as Hong Kong��s countdown toward the reversion to Chinese sovereignty drew the attention of the world. Yet given the violence and warfare that often plagued the end of European rule in other colonies, the end of British rule in Hong Kong was a remarkably calm and orderly process. Scarcely noticed outside of Hong Kong, one event neatly characterized the end of British rule in Hong Kong. In January 1987, with the support of the PRC government, the Hong Kong government announced that the Kowloon Walled City would be demolished and turned into a public park before 1997. Excluded from the 1898 lease of the New Territories but subsequently claimed by Britain after Qing troops helped villagers resist British rule in the New Territories, this small area became an independent enclave where the British generally took a hands-off approach. Although the Walled City had almost disappeared by the eve of World War II, it was revived after the war and after the 1949 revolution. As author Jan Morris puts it, the area ��felt like an enclave within the city, extra-territorial and even slightly unreal.��25

By the 1960s, the Walled City had grown into a hodgepodge of ramshackle buildings crammed so closely together that daylight could almost not come through. There was no formal sewage system, and electricity was tapped illegally through a mesh of wires that frequently led to fires. The area, writes Morris, was ��a frightful slum. No four-wheeled vehicle could enter it�Xthere were no streets wide enough�Xand its buildings, rising sometimes to ten or twelve storeys, were so inextricably packed together that they seemed to form one congealed mass of masonry, sealed together by overlapping structures, ladders, walk-ways, pipes and cables, and ventilated only by foetid air-shafts.... A maze of dark alleys pierced the mass from one side to the other. Virtually no daylight reached them. Looped electric cables festooned their low ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture.��26

Like Hong Kong itself, the Walled City became a city of contradictions and nuances. An internationally notorious center for drugs, gambling, and prostitution, it was also home to a close-knit community of more than thirty thousand residents with a strong sense of collective identity who lived among the shops, small factories and workshops, brothels, massage parlors, gambling dens, and unlicensed doctors and dentists. Although the Walled City was often managed and policed by powerful triad societies�Xleading critics to contrast its lawlessness and crime with the law and order in the rest of Hong Kong�Xby the early 1980s the crime rates appeared to be no higher than in the surrounding region. The PRC government had remained consistently ambivalent about the Walled City, never surrendering its claim to jurisdiction over the area yet never making too much of a commotion about it since that might suggest recognition of British jurisdiction over the rest of the region. Thus, concludes Morris, the Walled City ��remained a strange reminder of China��s stage in Hong Kong, and of the subtle, patient, cat-and-mouse way in which the Chinese viewed the progress of the colony.��27

In accordance with the 1987 agreement, in 1994 the Walled City was razed and turned into a classical Chinese garden that was officially opened in December 1995 by Hong Kong��s last colonial governor, Chris Patten. Just as the Joint Declaration put an end to Hong Kong��s uncertain political status, the decision to raze the Walled City signaled that China would regain full sovereignty over the region after 1997. As historian Seth Harter argues, recreating a classical Chinese garden where the Walled City once stood consciously stresses Hong Kong��s original Chineseness rather than the East-West hybridity that has defined much of Hong Kong��s history since the arrival of the British. The style of the garden comes from the early Qing era, the ��highpoint�� of pre-Opium War Chinese cultural and economic development and territorial integrity, a period in which China was ��virtually unmolested by European colonialism�� and during which imperial control over Guangdong and the Hong Kong region reached its zenith. Just as the Joint Declaration reunites long-lost Hong Kong with the rest of China, this ��purely Chinese�� garden unites Hong Kong��s precolonial past with its postcolonial present and future.28


NOTES
1
Alexander Grantham, Via Ports: From Hong Kong to Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1965), 112.
2
Hong Kong flansard: Reports of the Meetings of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, October 23, 1980, 103�V5, reprinted in Steve Tsang, ed., A Docurnenlury History of Hong Kong: Government and Politics (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995), 287�V88.
3
Elsie Tu, Colonial Hong Kong in the Eyes of Elsie Tu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 8, 15, 63.
4
Leo Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners: The Conflict between Public Interest and Private Profit in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 145.
5
Ibid., 13.
6
Tu, Colonial Hong Kong, 134.
7
Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners, 139.
8
Ibid., 143.
9
Ibid., 147.
10
Ibid., 31.
11
Ibid., 141.
12
Ibid.
13
Tu, Colonial Hong Kong, 117.
14
Lord MacLehose, ��Social and Economic Changes,�� in Sally Blyth and Ian Wotherspoon, Hong Kong Remembers (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996), 125.
15
Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners, 140, 148, 151.
16
Ibid., 146, 156.
17
Richard Hughes, Borrowed Place�XBorrowed Time: Hong Kong and Its Many Faces, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Andre Deutsch, 1976), 41�V42.
18
Kevin Rafferty, City on the Rocks: Hong Kong��s Uncertain Future (London: Viking, 1989), 389.
19
Lord Wilson, ��Learning to Live with China,�� in Blyth and Wotherspoon, Hong Kong Remembers, 179.
20
Quoted in Michael Yahuda, Hong Kong: China��s Challenge (London: Routledge, 1996), 21.
21
Percy Cradock, Experiences of China (London: John Murray, 1994), 209.
22
Wong Siu-lun, ��Deciding to Stay, Deciding to Move, Deciding Not to Decide,�� in Gary G. Hamilton, ed., Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 136.
23
Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners, 84.
24
James T. H. Tang, ��Hong Kong��s Transition to Chinese Rule: The Fate of the Joint Declaration,�� in Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot, eds., Hong Kong��s Transitions, 1842�V1997 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 150.
25
Jan Morris, Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire (New York: Vintage, 1997), 264.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 265.
28
Seth Harter, ��Hong Kong��s Dirty Little Secret: Clearing the Walled City of Kowloon,�� Journal of Urban History 27(1) (November 2000): 104�V 5.


The Countdown to 1997
By the late 1980s, most people in Hong Kong had reluctantly accepted the inevitability of Hong Kong��s reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. According to a 1988 poll, more than half of the respondents believed that reversion to Chinese rule would hurt civil rights and individual liberty. Almost half said that they trusted the Hong Kong government, about 30 percent said that they trusted the British government, but only about 20 percent said that they trusted the Chinese government. More than 70 percent wanted the Hong Kong government to be democratic (although only 25 percent supported the creation of political parties). The events in Beijing during the spring of 1989, however, caused many people in Hong Kong to lose all faith in the Chinese government and to ��consciously ... reevaluate their identities and their options for the future.��1

After the death on April 15, 1989, of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Hu Yaobang, who had been sacked for failing to end student demonstrations in 1986, university students in Beijing organized a series of prodemocracy demonstrations. By May 4, the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the demonstrations had attracted the world��s attention. On May 13, the students occupied Tiananmen Square, where they began a hunger strike protesting government corruption and demanding democratic reforms. In Hong Kong, the demonstrations in Beijing were hopeful signs that China was on the verge of becoming more democratic. However, when Premier Li Peng imposed martial law on May 20, more than five hundred thousand Hong Kong people braved a typhoon and marched in the streets to show their support for the demonstrators.
Some marched to show their Chinese patriotism. Others were frustrated that Hong Kong people had been left out of the Sino-British negotiations and the Joint Declaration. Leaders of the local democracy movement organized the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China, which quickly raised money, mainly through a huge pop concert, to send blankets, sleeping bags, and tents for the students in Beijing. The demonstrations in Beijing also convinced many people of the need to accelerate Hong Kong��s own democratization. On May 24, the official members of the Executive and Legislative Councils unanimously agreed that 50 percent of Hong Kong��s legislature should be directly elected by 1995 and 100 percent by 2003. Even conservative businesspeople who had normally opposed the introduction of democracy in Hong Kong started to express their support for the students and to hope that political reform in China might accelerate democratization in Hong Kong.
TIANANMEN SQUARE: REACTIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
The Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4 ��sent the whole colony into mourning.��2 Like the millions of people across the world who saw images of the massacre on television, people in Hong Kong were shocked, disgusted, and horrified. They also worried that something similar could happen in Hong Kong after 1997. In the largest public demonstration in Hong Kong��s history, almost one million people�Xmany of them dressed in the traditional Chinese mourning colors of black and white or wearing black armbands�Xmarched in the streets to support the fallen demonstrators and to condemn the PRC leadership. The protests brought out all elements of Hong Kong��s population, including otherwise apolitical businesspeople, pro-Beijing trade unionists, and employees of the Bank of China and pro-Beijing newspapers. The cenotaph in Central District honoring Hong Kong��s war dead was covered with flowers and black flags. Many people donated blood. Others tried to force a run on local PRC banks by withdrawing all their deposits. The Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China received more than thirty million Hong Kong dollars in donations to support prodemocracy activities in the PRC.
Tiananmen Square changed local attitudes toward the 1997 transition and the Chinese government. Older Chinese who had left the mainland before or after the Communists took over in 1949 had often kept their negative views of the PRC. But many younger people had been convinced that the Chinese government had changed, especially after Deng Xiaoping��s reforms in the late 1970s. Tiananmen Square, however, caused many Hong Kong people to lose all faith in the PRC government and in Hong Kong��s future. This was reflected in how the stock market dropped by 25 percent and property values sank while applications for immigration visas soared, and in surveys later that year that showed how confidence in the PRC not to make changes after 1997 had plummeted. Democratic Party leader Martin Lee compared handing over Hong Kong people to China with surrendering Jews to Adolf Hitler��s Germany. Lydia Dunn, a prominent businesswoman and member of the Executive Council, asked how the British could in good conscience surrender ��British citizens to a regime that did not hesitate to use its tanks and forces on its own people.��
The initial British reaction to the Tiananmen Square Massacre was shock. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed ��utter revulsion and outrage�� at the killings, promising to help assuage the concerns of Hong Kong people by relaxing British immigration laws. In July 1989, the British government unilaterally suspended the Sino-British Joint Liaison Group meetings scheduled for that summer. Nevertheless, the British insisted that the 1984 Joint Declaration remained in force and that Beijing had pledged to keep Hong Kong autonomous for fifty years. And there was little the British government could do. When Thatcher raised the Hong Kong situation that summer at several international forums, the People��s Daily accused the British of trying to use international support to keep China from recovering Hong Kong. The British did, however, take several measures designed to appease the international community and to restore confidence in Hong Kong: a nationality plan that would encourage people to stay in Hong Kong, the acceleration of representative government, and a Bill of Rights that would continue after 1997.
British officials, Hong Kong government officials, and local business leaders realized that a sudden exodus from Hong Kong could have catastrophic results. The Legislative and Executive Councils thus launched the ��Hong Kong is Our Home�� campaign, asking the British government to give full British citizenship, with right of abode, to the 3.25 million British subjects in Hong Kong and to help the rest find homes elsewhere, the idea being to keep people in Hong Kong by giving them the option to leave if conditions soured after 1997. Not surprising given the rising unemployment rate in Britain, Thatcher��s government rejected this request, which the Chinese government would have considered an insult to its guarantees in the Joint Declaration. In July 1989, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe visited Hong Kong, where he discounted the possibility of granting full citizenship. Instead, the British government reluctantly agreed to Governor David Wilson��s request to grant British citizenship to fifty thousand qualified people in important positions and their direct dependents for up to a total 225,000 Hong Kong residents.
Announced in December 1989, the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act offered full British nationality to fifty thousand such people and their families. (With two-thirds from the private sector and one-third from the public sector, the number of people to be granted British citizenship was a compromise between the Foreign Office, which wanted as many as possible, and the Home Office, which wanted as few as possible.) The Chinese government accused the British of violating the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law, insisting that it would not recognize these people as British citizens after 1997. As it turned out, the nationality package drew considerably fewer applicants than the British and Hong Kong governments had expected, mainly because most people realized that the scheme was devised to convince them to stay in Hong Kong and because the PRC insisted that it would not honor the consular protection rights of the new passports.
The Bill of Rights, enacted in June 1991, was another part of the British government��s attempt to restore confidence in Hong Kong. The Chinese government opposed the bill from the outset, insisting that it violated the law and the spirit of the Joint Declaration and that the Basic Law already provided sufficient protection. Local jurists disagreed, however, and in October 1989 Governor Wilson announced that the government would introduce a new Bill of Rights that would enshrine the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; and the International Labour Conventions. The Chinese understandably took the bill as an insult. Not only did it question the sincerity of their promise to maintain Hong Kong��s existing economic and political systems, but the British had waited until the last decade of their rule in Hong Kong to introduce such a bill.
PRC officials now claimed the right to review and repeal all Hong Kong laws (including the Bill of Rights) that violated the Basic Law.
Although the Chinese government was eager to restore confidence in Hong Kong after the Tiananmen Square Massacre and reiterated its promise that Hong Kong would not change after 1997, it condemned Hong Kong people for sending money to the striking students and accused them of helping the students try to overthrow the Chinese government. Some PRC officials even referred to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations as a joint U.S.-Hong Kong plot. The Chinese government also purged several local Communist groups that had supported the demonstrators and had participated in the Hong Kong protests. On July 11, 1989, new CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin cautioned that ��the well water does not interfere with the river water,�� implying that since China would not try to introduce Socialism into Hong Kong after 1997, Hong Kong should not try to force democracy and capitalism into China, and warning Hong Kong people not to interfere in mainland politics. On July 21, the People��s Daily condemned Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, the two founders of the Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China, for directing ��subversive activities�� against the Chinese government. The Chinese government excluded Lee and Szeto from the Basic Law Drafting Committee (although this gave the two men even more support in Hong Kong) and urged the Hong Kong government to ban the alliance. Although the Hong Kong government argued that such alliances were perfectly legal in Hong Kong, on October 23 William Ehrman, Hong Kong��s political advisor, assured Ji Shaoxiang, head of the New China News Agency Hong Kong branch��s foreign affairs department, that the Hong Kong government had ��no intention of allowing Hong Kong to be used as a base for subversive activities�� against China.

THE AIRPORT CONTROVERSY
The Tiananmen Square Massacre undermined the already tenuous trust between the British and Chinese governments and harmed Sino-British relations for the next few years. It also created an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between the Hong Kong and Chinese governments. In the fall of 1989, for example, a dispute arose over the case of Yang Yang, a Chinese swimmer who had sought asylum in Hong Kong and claimed to be a member of a prodemocracy organization in China. When the Hong Kong government refused the Chinese government��s demand to repatriate Yang, the Chinese government refused to accept Chinese illegal immigrants arrested in Hong Kong. This caused great anxiety in both Hong Kong, where many people feared that the news would encourage an influx of illegal immigrants, and in Guangdong, where officials worried that their province would be overrun by unemployed people from all over China en route to Hong Kong.
The Yang incident faded from importance by late October, but tensions between the Hong Kong and Chinese governments were inflamed that month when Governor Wilson announced a plan to build a new airport and container port at Chek Lap Kok, off of Lantau Island. The existing airport at Kai Tak in Kowloon could not be expanded, and Hong Kong had recently passed Rotterdam to become the world��s busiest container port. The Port and Airport Development Strategy (PADS) project would cost almost HK$130 billion and would take until 2006 to complete, although the first stage (the airport) would be completed by 1997. Wilson later denied such assertions, but many observers saw the project as an attempt to restore public confidence in Hong Kong��s future, especially since Wilson announced the project the same month that he initiated the process for drafting the Bill of Rights.
In the wake of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the PADS project almost immediately became a source of contention between Britain and China. Insisting that it was supposed to be consulted on all policies that would affect post-1997 Hong Kong, the Chinese government saw the project as a clever scheme to make it pay for any construction not completed by 1997. As Jiang Zemin put it, ��You invite the guests, but I pay the bill.�� On April 27, 1990, Guo Fengmin, the new Chinese head of the Joint Liaison Group, insisted that China be consulted on all major decisions. In August Ji Pengfei, director of the Chinese State Council��s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, asked Britain to send a delegation to Beijing to discuss the airport project. The British government, which saw the airport as an internal economic issue that required no approval from either the British or the Chinese governments, accused China of withholding support as a way to force Britain to curb democratization in Hong Kong. Still, in September 1990 Lord Caithness, British minister for Hong Kong, suddenly visited Hong Kong and declared that Beijing should be consulted on the airport project and ordered the Hong Kong government to provide information about the project to Chinese officials.
Even before the PRC airport delegation arrived, however, in October the Hong Kong government announced that the first stage of the project, the construction of the Lantau Bridge, would proceed as scheduled with public money. After the Chinese government refused to endorse the project, Governor Wilson visited Beijing in January 1991 to discuss the airport project. Wilson now stressed that the Hong Kong government was ready to be flexible and agreed on the need to consult China on any such projects transcending July 1997. In April, British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd�X the most senior British official to visit China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre�Xwent to Beijing to discuss the airport project. Finally, in June, Percy Cradock, foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister John Major, led a secret mission to Beijing to discuss the airport issue. Meanwhile, Governor Wilson visited London, where he met with Major and other senior British officials.
After more than a year and a half, an elaborate compromise was finally reached. On June 30, 1991, Cradock initialed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese, and on July 4 Wilson announced a Sino-British accord on the airport project: Hong Kong would pay for the first part of the project, a PRC official would participate in the planning and construction, British and Chinese foreign ministers would meet twice a year, and Prime Minister Major would visit China as a gesture of respect (making him the first major Western leader to visit China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre). On September 3, 1991, Major went to Beijing, where he signed the Memorandum of Understanding with Premier Li Peng. Although the memorandum eased tensions between Britain and China, many people in Hong Kong considered it an unnecessary concession that would give China excessive influence over Hong Kong��s finances before 1997.

COPING WITH 1997
The people of Hong Kong had no say in the compromises between Britain and China following the Tiananmen Square Massacre. One proposal, which the PRC government would have never accepted but which revealed the sense of frustration and helplessness in Hong Kong, called for urging China to lease the region to the United Nations for one hundred years. Some observers even posited a connection between this sense of malaise and Hong Kong��s rising divorce rate, which doubled from 1983 to 1992. And even if they did not worry about a brutal crackdown such as that at Tiananmen Square, many people justifiably worried that PRC officials simply did not understand Hong Kong well enough. In 1988, Xu Jiatun, then sitting director of the Hong Kong branch of the New China News Agency, admitted that had he not lived and worked in Hong Kong for four years, he would have had the same ignorant views of capitalism as his comrades on the mainland. In March 1995, Li Ruihan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Politburo, admitted that Chinese leaders lacked an understanding of what had made Hong Kong so successful. Li compared the recovery of Hong Kong with a story about a woman who had agreed to sell a hundred-year-old teapot that was famous for the tea it dispensed. Not realizing that the tea��s flavor derived from the residue that had built up inside, she scrubbed and polished the teapot. When the purchaser came to claim his teapot, he declared it worthless. As Li explained, ��if you don��t understand something, you are unaware of what makes it valuable and it will be difficult to keep it intact.��3

The crackdown at Tiananmen Square and the uncertainty surrounding 1997 created such a panic that many Hong Kong people responded with two main strategies: by voting with their feet and by voting with the ballot. Emigration was part of a longer-term pattern rather than just a reaction to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but the number of emigrants rose dramatically from 40,000 in 1989 to 65,000 in 1990, cresting at 66,000 in 1992. From 1984 to the eve of the transition, around 10 percent of Hong Kong��s population left�Xmainly for Australia, Canada, and the United States but also to Britain, New Zealand, and Singapore. (When the Singapore government announced after the Tiananmen Square Massacre that it would allow 25,000 Hong Kong families to immigrate over the next five to eight years, more than 10,000 people showed up the next day at the Singapore consulate.) By the early 1990s, there were approximately 58,000 Hong Kong-born people in Australia, 500,000 in Canada, and 147,000 in the United States�Xmostly concentrated in large cities such as Sydney, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto. And even though various British immigration acts from the 1960s to the 1980s slowed immigration to Britain, by the mid-1990s Chinese comprised the third-largest ethnic group in Britain.
Although many emigrants returned after obtaining foreign citizenship, this mass emigration both expanded Hong Kong communities overseas and created two new types of family structures: astronaut households and parachute kids. Also a Cantonese pun meaning a man with an absentee wife, the term ��astronauts�� refers to fathers who have moved their families but who continue to shuttle back and forth for business between Hong Kong and their new adoptive countries; parachute kids are the offspring of parents who have returned to Hong Kong but who leave their children overseas for safety. Scholars have suggested that both arrangements complicate the idea of where home actually lies and demonstrate a reluctance to sever completely all ties with Hong Kong. Perhaps the economic factor is even more important: these families quickly learned that they could not make as much money in their new adoptive countries as they could in Hong Kong.
Even while the Tiananmen Square Massacre drove many people out of Hong Kong, it created a political awakening by bringing more people into local politics. Although this new interest in politics was based on concern for the crackdown in Beijing, it also reflected fears about what the PRC authorities could do in Hong Kong after 1997. According to a poll in February 1994, 58 percent of respondents were satisfied with the performance of the Hong Kong government, but only 29 percent were satisfied with the performance of the PRC government in China. As sociologist Alvin So explains, the Tiananmen Square Massacre ��led to an explosion in Hong Kong��s civil society.�� All sorts of new civic organizations were founded, and student movements were revived. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre, ��the terms democracy and democrats became hegemonic in Hong Kong��s political discourse,�� as even conservative businesspeople and pro-Beijing leftists changed their minds about democratization.4 The Tiananmen Square Massacre also helped strengthen the existing sense of Hong Kong identity. It reminded many people that although they were ethnically Chinese, they did not identify with the Communist government of China. ��Hong Kong people,�� argue political scientists Lynn White and Li Cheng, ��became more fully Chinese in that year, even while their disaffection with the Chinese government
soared and while they looked internationally for safe havens they might later need.��5

After the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the British were under great local and international pressure to speed up Hong Kong��s democratization. But China opposed the recommendation by the official members of the Executive and Legislative Councils for 50 percent of Hong Kong��s legislature to be directly elected by 1995 and 100 percent by 2003. In January 1990, Governor Wilson convinced Premier Li Peng and other Chinese officials in Beijing that not increasing the number of directly elected Legislative Council members in 1991 would undermine public confidence in both the Hong Kong government and in Beijing��s post-1997 political plans. As a compromise, the British agreed to allow eighteen directly elected Legislative Council seats in 1991, while China would allow twenty directly elected seats in the HKSAR council in 1997, twenty-four in 1999, and thirty by 2003. In March 1991, more than 424,000 (32.5 percent of the electorate) voted in the District Board elections. In May, more than 393,000 (23 percent of the electorate) voted in the Urban Council and Regional Council elections. Although less than 40 percent (some 750,000 people) of registered voters turned out, the first direct elections to the Legislative Council, held in September 1991, showed many Hong Kong people��s feelings toward the PRC government. The most important issue was the candidates�� reaction to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Prodemocracy candidates won as handily as all the pro-Beijing candidates lost. The United Democrats�Xformed in 1990 and led by Martin Lee, Szeto Wah, Yeung Sum (a professor of social work), Ng Sung-man (a doctor), Lee Wing-tat (a teacher), Siu Yin-ying (a union leader), and Ng Ming-yum (an educator)�Xwon twelve of the eighteen seats.
The September 1991 elections were so humiliating to China that Lu Ping, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the PRC State Council, warned Governor Wilson not to appoint Martin Lee or Szeto Wah to the Executive Council. Adding insult to injury, on October 1, the PRC��s National Day, most of the directly elected legislative councilors protested against China��s treatment of political prisoners. Although in March 1992 Lu Ping encouraged Hong Kong people to become involved in local party politics, in June Guo Fengmin, the Chinese head of the Joint Liaison Group, opposed the possibility of Martin Lee being appointed to the Executive Council. Wilson insisted that such appointments were the prerogative of the governor alone, but in deference to China none of the United Democrat leaders was invited to join the Executive Council.

THE LAST IMPERIALIST: CHRIS PATTEN��S REFORMS
Into this politically and emotionally charged atmosphere stepped the last colonial governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten. Nicknamed ��the last imperialist�� because he had been sent to manage Britain��s withdrawal from its final major colony, Patten, when he arrived in the summer of 1992, made it clear from the start that he would be a different governor. Not only did he dispense with the traditional governor��s uniform and regalia, but he was also the first Hong Kong governor to be a political appointee, having been given the post of governor by his friend John Major for helping the Conservative Party win the 1992 elections as chairman of the party (although he had lost his own seat in the House of Commons).
As a political appointee, Patten had more political clout than earlier governors. In early October 1992 he announced a range of proposals for political reforms in 1994/1995 that would widen the electoral base of the functional constituencies and strengthen representation in the Legislative Council. The reforms would include raising the number of directly elected Legislative Council seats from eighteen to twenty (in accordance with the Basic Law), eliminating all appointed seats to the Municipal Councils and District Boards, widening the electoral base of the twenty-one functional constituencies by replacing corporate voting with individual voting and adding nine new functional constituencies, combining multiple-seat geographic constituencies into single-seat constituencies, and reducing the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen (as in Britain and China).
Given how long and hard the British had argued against political reform in Hong Kong, many critics�Xand not just in the PRC government�Xargued that Patten arrived in Hong Kong with a mandate from the British government to engineer an honorable withdrawal from Hong Kong, to curb anti-British feeling stemming from the uncertainty after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and to help maintain British influence after 1997. But Patten��s proposed reforms also reflected the desires of many liberal politicians in Hong Kong. In May 1992, Martin Lee and Yeung Sum, chairman and vice chairman of the United Democrats, went to Britain, where they met with John Major and governor-designate Patten to discuss the possibility of increasing the number of directly elected seats in the 1995 election. As Patten put it, he was trying to work within the ��grey areas�� in the Basic Law, giving Hong Kong people as much control over their own affairs as possible while ensuring certainty about Hong Kong��s post-1997 future. ��The reality,�� argues Leo Goodstadt, ��was that, by the late 1990s, it was obvious that without an expansion of the public��s participation in the process of government, the credibility of Hong Kong��s political institutions could not be maintained and there would be a crisis of governability.��6

Patten��s reforms were not as radical as he made them seem, for less than one-third of the Legislative Council would be elected directly. But the reforms exceeded what China had in mind and broke with the (albeit rather new) practice of consulting with China over any political arrangements that would affect post-1997 Hong Kong. The Chinese government, which distrusted Patten from the start, claimed that his proposals violated the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law, and the understanding between the British foreign secretary and the Chinese foreign minister in 1990. Patten��s reforms made him very popular in Hong Kong, however, especially among ordinary people. Although Beijing demanded that Patten be replaced, the British knew that doing so would hurt their prestige, not just in Hong Kong but also among the international community. In March 1993, China agreed to negotiate with Britain over electoral arrangements for the 1994/1995 elections. The Chinese were willing to lower the voting age but not to end the practice of appointing members to the Municipal Councils and District Boards, insisting that this should be a matter for the post-1997 government to decide. The Chinese also wanted the continuation of corporate voting, since they wanted business and financial interests to be represented in the Legislative Council. The Chinese accepted proposals for a single-seat, single-vote for the Municipal Councils and the District Boards, but they wanted to postpone plans for the Legislative Council.
Despite seventeen rounds of negotiations, the two sides failed to reach an agreement. After publishing the negotiations in a parliamentary white paper and insisting that their proposals were what Hong Kong people wanted, in November 1993 the British pushed through a modified version of Patten��s proposal, giving the PRC only a few days�� notice while hoping to continue the negotiations. The PRC ended the negotiations and announced its ��second stove�� (the Chinese terms for setting up a new household) policy, insisting that all of Patten��s reforms would be replaced by new institutions after 1997. The PRC also preemptively formed the Preliminary Working Committee to look into appointing the HKSAR Preparatory Committee to handle arrangements for Hong Kong after July 1, 1997. Led by Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, all fifty-seven members of the Preliminary Working Committee either were from the PRC political machinery or were Hong Kong residents known for opposing Patten��s proposals. The Chinese charged the British with being insincere and violating the Sino-British agreements and understandings, blaming them for the collapse of the negotiations. With the support of the Legislative Council, which voted 32 to 24 in late June 1994 in favor of his proposals, Patten then decided to proceed unilaterally with his proposals for District Board and Municipal Council elections in 1994 and elections for the Legislative Council in 1995. Beijing responded by declaring that the last Legislative Council elected under Patten��s reforms would be dissolved after the 1997 transition and replaced by the Provisional Legislative Council appointed by a four hundred-member selection committee. This dashed any hopes for a through train of legislators who would serve through the transition until mid-1999.
Overlooking the earlier tensions after the Tiananmen Square Massacre and over the airport project, many critics blamed Patten for ending a decade of Sino-British understanding. Patten��s supporters, however, insisted that Beijing was simply using his reforms to enhance its control over Hong Kong before the transition. Both sides underestimated the complexity of Patten��s dilemma: he wanted to make the British look good and obtain the support of Hong Kong people by introducing democracy and to come off better than Wilson (who was seen by many in Hong Kong and Britain as having been too willing to give in to the PRC), all while trying to keep on good terms with the PRC government, which refused to believe that Patten could be sincere about political reform. To make things worse for Patten, London suddenly tried to patch things up with Beijing in 1995 by withdrawing support for his reforms.
Regardless, Patten��s proposals led to years of friction and mistrust between Beijing and London, with each side insisting that it had adhered to both the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. Because Beijing was afraid that the Hong Kong democracy movement would revive the democracy movement on the mainland, it took a much stronger stance against Hong Kong��s democratic reforms than it had before the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Some Chinese officials saw Patten��s proposal not only as a violation of the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law but also as an attempt to maintain British influence and even to help destabilize China by introducing democratization. China also accused Britain of violating certain secret agreements that the British claimed they had never made. Beijing came up with an anti-imperialist discourse not seen since the days of the Cultural Revolution, including colorful names for Patten�Xsuch as ��liar,�� ��serpent,�� ��prostitute,�� ��two-headed snake,�� ��sinner of the millennium,�� and ��tango dancer���Xfor introducing democracy only after 150 years of colonialism and for violating the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. It also supported the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, a local grassroots political group that had been established soon after Patten arrived in Hong Kong in 1992.
Although Sino-British relations improved somewhat after 1995, with agreements on the Court of Final Appeal and the new airport project, they were far from smooth. After Qian Qichen visited Britain in October 1995, the British and Chinese foreign ministers agreed to work together on matters dealing with Hong Kong. Patten pledged to help the Preparatory Committee and whoever was appointed to be the HKSAR��s chief executive. Lu Ping, director of the PRC��s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, visited Hong Kong in March 1996, while Anson Chan, Hong Kong��s chief secretary, went to Beijing the following month. However, the two sides could not agree on arrangements for the handover ceremony in July 1997. The Hong Kong government was reluctant to transfer certain information about government departments to the PRC. It also steadfastly opposed the establishment of the provisional legislature, insisting that Hog Kong could not have two legislative bodies at once.
When Beijing and London began working together directly to plan for the 1997 transition, Chris Patten became gradually marginalized. (Percy Cradock called this the ��spectacle of the incredible shrinking governor.��) Nevertheless, his reforms had several important effects in Hong Kong. They benefited the prodemocracy forces since the Democrats controlled almost half of the Legislative Council seats after 1995. Patten��s proposals led to conflict between Britain and China, but they also represented the desires of many Hong Kong people, which could be seen in the results of the Legislative Council elections of 1995. In September, 36 percent of Hong Kong��s registered voters turned out, many of them voting against candidates seen as being pro-Beijing, such as the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong. Pro-Beijing candidates won only sixteen out of sixty seats. Martin Lee��s Democratic Party, despite its electoral successes, did not win power, but prodemocracy candidates such as Lee, Szeto Wah, Lau Chin-shek, and Emily Lau became the most popular members of the Legislative Council.
On the one hand, Patten��s reforms increased political participation through regular channels so dramatically that ��voting had become a socially acceptable behavior.��7 On the other hand, the reforms promoted a contested democracy since Beijing, irate at Patten for violating the Joint Declaration, appointed prominent businesspeople as local advisors to the Preliminary Working Committee. In late January 1996, Beijing established the Hong Kong Preparatory Committee, as stipulated in the Basic Law. Led by Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, the committee consisted of 150 members (56 from the mainland and 94 from Hong Kong). Many of the Hong Kong members were businessmen known for being pro-Beijing; 28 came from political parties or political groups such as the New Hong Kong Alliance, the Hong Kong Progressive Alliance, the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, the Liberal Democratic Foundation, and the Association for Democracy and People��s Livelihood. Most of the Hong Kong people were members of the Chinese People��s Political Consultative Conference (the PRC��s main political advisory board) and the National People��s Congress. The most glaring absence was that of the Democratic Party, even though it was the largest political party in the Legislative Council: Martin Lee��s criticism of Beijing and support for Patten��s reforms led Beijing to exclude his party from the committee.
In November 1996, the Preparatory Committee formed a four hundred-member Selection Committee to pick the HKSAR��s first chief executive and the Provisional Legislative Council. This committee was also overwhelmingly big business (including heavyweights such as Li Ka-shing, Walter Kwok, Gordon Wu, Stanley Ho, and Lee Shau-kee). In December, the Selection Committee created an unelected provisional legislature for after June 30, 1997, drawing protests from both the Hong Kong and British governments. The Preparatory Committee tried to make this provisional body look like a Hong Kong Legislative Council: more than half of the sixty members were on the pre-existing Legislative Council (four members of the Association for Democracy and People��s Livelihood were included, although no one from Martin Lee��s Democratic Party was). However, ten of the defeated pro-PRC candidates from the 1995 elections were appointed to the provisional council, while 85 percent of the appointees were on the Selection Committee. When a Hong Kong member of the Preparatory Committee voted against establishing the provisional legislature, Chinese officials declared that he would be barred from that committee as well as from the committee for selecting the chief executive of post-1997 Hong Kong.
Patten��s reforms may have also prompted Beijing to take a tougher approach to Hong Kong and to show that it would not tolerate criticism and dissent. In August 1994, the Chinese government closed down the Beijing branch of Giordano, a chain of clothing stores owned by colorful Hong Kong entrepreneur Jimmy Lai. Also the founder of Next Magazine, Hong Kong��s best-selling weekly, Lai had routinely criticized the PRC leadership, even calling Premier Li Peng ��a turtle��s egg with a zero IQ�� and ��a national shame.�� The reforms also fueled the general sense of uncertainty that pervaded Hong Kong in the mid-1990s. There was a serious concern about whether upper-level civil servants would be able to keep their posts after 1997, especially those who had supported Patten��s proposals. And rather than helping Britain make an honorable withdrawal from Hong Kong, the reforms drew attention to its historical failures. In October 1996, for example, Lee Cheuk-yan, a Legislative Council member known for his anti-Beijing views, criticized the British for waiting so long to introduce democracy.

THE RACE FOR HKSAR CHIEF EXECUTIVE
With the Provisional legislative Council selected, in December 1996 Premier Li Peng appointed Tung Chee-hwa, a former shipping magnate, as the chief executive who would run Hong Kong after the transition. The selection process for chief executive had not been democratic, but it was designed to involve the entire Hong Kong community, with the candidates meeting all the main political parties and interest groups. Interviews with the Selection Committee were broadcast on television and viewed widely. The campaign also showed how many of the same elites who had previously urged the British to try to hold on to Hong Kong changed their allegiance after the Joint Declaration in 1984. T. S. Lo (son of Eurasian lawyer Lo Man Kam), who started going by his Chinese name, Lo Tak-shing, took a PRC passport in the early 1990s and gave up his British citizenship and his title of Commander of the British Empire. When Lo, whose popularity rating was only around 1 percent, withdrew, Simon Li, former justice and director of the Bank of East Asia (and nephew of Li Tse-fong, whom we met in chapter 5), entered the race. Li supported the Provisional Legislative Council and tightening public security to maintain Hong Kong��s stability and prosperity. Chief Justice Ti-liang Yang, who gave up his British knighthood, warned against challenging the PRC��s supremacy. Peter Woo, son-in-law of late shipping tycoon Y. K. Pao, checked with Beijing before announcing his intention to run.
The selection of Tung, who won 80 percent of the votes, surprised no one. Many pundits had considered his selection a done deal when Chinese president and CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin singled him out for an exceptionally cordial handshake at an earlier meeting in Beijing. While many critics, particularly in the Western media, scoffed at Tung��s lack of political experience and dismissed him as a Beijing lackey, some Chinese leaders and pro-Beijing forces in Hong Kong were concerned about his political reliability (he had old family connections with Taiwan). The American press in particular dismissed him as Beijing��s man, but, as local journalist Frank Ching argued on the eve of the handover, all colonial governors had been appointed by London, without any consultation with Hong Kong people; at least Tung��s appointment involved some consultation with Hong Kong people.8

Born in Shanghai, Tung was educated there and in Hong Kong and Britain and worked in the United States in the 1960s. Although his father had been driven out of China after the 1949 revolution and went to Hong Kong, where he built a shipping empire that his son would inherit, he sent his son to a pro-Beijing school in Hong Kong. The younger Tung had old ties to the PRC government, for the Bank of China had helped rescue his firm, Orient Overseas, from bankruptcy in the 1980s. He had been a member of the Consultative Committee for the Basic Law Drafting Committee and had been nominated to the Chinese People��s Political Consultative Committee by the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office and by the New China News Agency local branch. He also had considerable business and political experience in Hong Kong. Although he was not widely known until the campaign in late 1996, he was among the first group of Hong Kong advisors chosen by Beijing in 1992 and became a member of Patten��s Executive Council the same year after the PRC government recommended Tung indirectly (although he ultimately resigned from this position to avoid any conflict of interest with his position on the Preparatory Committee).
Shortly after his selection as chief executive and while Patten was still governor, Tung appointed his Executive Council designed to satisfy both Hong Kong people and PRC interests, partly by retaining two members of Patten��s Executive Council. By not including any of the Democrats on his council, however, Tung prompted complaints that the new Executive Council was no different from the old colonial one. He also drew fire for supporting Chinese proposals to limit political expression in Hong Kong. Frequently emphasizing social order when talking about civil liberties, Tung consistently defended his attitudes toward public demonstrations and protests in Hong Kong by invoking his memories of protests in the United States, where he ��saw what happened with the slow erosion of authority�� as ��society became less orderly than is desirable.�� Throughout his campaign for chief executive, he had insisted that Hong Kong people cared more about housing and education than about politics and protests. He had warned that freedom of expression might have to be sacrificed in order to prevent international forces from interfering in the handover. He was also criticized for opposing foreign donations to local political parties, even though he had donated heavily to the British Conservative Party in the 1992 general election.

THE COUNTDOWN ENDS
At 8:00 P.M. on June 30, 1997, the most expensive fireworks display in all of history exploded over Hong Kong��s Victoria Harbour. Shortly afterward, as four thousand guests sat down to an elegant banquet at the newly built harbor-front Convention Centre in Wanchai, troops of the People��s Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the border to assume their positions in the Hong Kong garrison. Led by Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the British throne, the British delegation to the handover ceremony included Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Governor Chris Patten, and General Charles Guthrie, chief of the British General Staff. On the Chinese side sat President Jiang Zemin (Deng Xiaoping had died earlier that year), Premier Li Peng, Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, PLA chief and vice chairman of the Central Military Commission General Zhang Wannian, and Tung Chee-hwa. Among the guests were representatives from all over the world. In what a Guangzhou newspaper described as ��the battle of the century for the Chinese and foreign media,�� thousands of journalists came to cover this historic occasion and the festivities surrounding it. Accompanied by renowned French-born, Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma and a children��s choir from the mainland, the Hong Kong Philharmonic played Symphony 1997, written specially for the handover by mainland composer Tan Dun.
After the colonial Hong Kong flag was lowered at 11:30 P.M., Prince Charles began his speech, much of which dealt with the guarantees enshrined in the 1984 Sino-British Declaration. The prince explained that Hong Kong��s ��dynamism and stability�� had made its economy ��the envy of the world�� and had shown how ��East and West can live and work together.�� The ��solemn pledges made before the world in the 1984 Joint Declaration,�� declared Prince Charles, would ��guarantee the continuity of Hong Kong��s way of life.�� He promised that Britain would ��maintain its unwavering support for the Joint Declaration.�� As midnight and the end of British rule drew near, the prince promised the people of Hong Kong that ��we shall not forget you, and we shall watch with the closest interest as you embark on this new era of your remarkable history.��9

At midnight, July 1, the British flag was lowered and the Chinese flag raised, accompanied by the new flag of the Hong Kong SAR, emblazoned with a bauhinia flower, the official symbol of the new SAR. Approximately half a mile away, the camp commander of the British Forces headquarters in Hong Kong turned over the building to the PLA. President Jiang Zemin, the first PRC leader to visit Hong Kong, declared that July 1, 1997, would ��go down in the annals of history as a day that merits eternal memory.�� Jiang explained that the ��return of Hong Kong to the motherland after going through a century of vicissitudes indicates that from now on, the Hong Kong compatriots have become true masters of this Chinese land and that Hong Kong has now entered a new era of development.�� He promised that the PRC government would ��unswervingly�� abide by the one country, two systems concept.10

In his inaugural speech, Tung Chee-hwa, the first Chinese to administer Hong Kong in more than 150 years, declared that ��for the first time in history, we, the people of Hong Kong, will be master of our own destiny.�� Stressing how ��Hong Kong and China are whole again,�� Tung reassured his new constituency and the world that ��we value this empowerment and we will exercise our powers prudently and responsibly.��11 Shortly after the handover ceremony, the British delegation left the former colony on the Royal Yacht Britannia and on HMS Chatham. As Patten and his family waved farewell to the crowds assembled at the dock, the Royal Marines band played ��Rule Britannia�� and ��Land of Hope and Glory.�� In a display of military might not seen since the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth��s coronation in 1953, early in the morning of July 1 four thousand troops and twenty personnel carriers of the PLA crossed the border. Other troops arrived by helicopters and naval ships.
Like any historical event, the handover meant something different to the various parties involved. For Britain, it marked the end of what had once been the world��s greatest empire, by now limited mainly to Gibraltar and a dozen or so small islands scattered across the oceans of the world. ��Under menacing monsoon skies,�� the BBC television news reported on June 30, ��Hong Kong woke up to its final day of British rule and to an appointment with uncertain destiny.��12 In a rain-drenched, emotional ceremony held on June 30 at the former British naval base, Patten declared the day a ��cause for celebration not for sorrow.�� Emphasizing Hong Kong��s ��promise�� and ��unshakeable destiny,�� he insisted that ��the story of this great city is about the years before this night and the years of success that will surely follow it.��13 Royal Marines bandsmen in white tropical uniforms lined up with kilted pipers from the Black Watch and the Scottish Division and with musicians from the Gurkhas and the Scots Guards for one final tattoo. Thousands of spectators watched members of the British Army, the Royal Air Force, and the Royal Navy march before Prince Charles, Patten, and other British representatives. As the rain came down, the Union Jack was lowered. Conspicuously missing from this ceremony was Tung Chee-hwa, who was greeting President Jiang Zemin. Tung had insisted before the ceremony that his absence should not be considered a slight to the British, but it nonetheless symbolized Hong Kong��s new political status. And instead of driving three times round the driveway of Government House�X an old tradition signifying that a colonial governor would return�Xthis time Patten��s limousine did not make a third circuit.
Yet the handover had also brought Britain a new sense of prestige and respect. In the years counting down to 1997, the British, who had not introduced political representation until late in their rule in Hong Kong, were magically transformed�Xparticularly in the Western media�Xinto stalwarts of democratic reform, especially compared to the PRC regime. Any concerns about the colonial government��s history of racial discrimination and lack of political representation were lost in the self-congratulatory assurances that had Hong Kong not become such a prosperous place under the British, the PRC might never have wanted it back in the first place. The BBC report praised Hong Kong as ��Britain��s legacy, a free market low-tax paradise, the perfect marriage of Chinese energy and benign British administration.��14 Mike Chinoy, Hong Kong bureau chief for news network CNN, noted that American news coverage of the PLA troops marching into Hong Kong ��really gave the impression that the butchers of Beijing were arriving,�� ignoring the ��thousands of happy residents in the New Territories who welcomed the PLA.��15


Governor Chris Pitten receiving the British and Hong Kong colonial flags, June 30, 1997. Photo courtesy of Tim Ko.
A huge diplomatic, national, and psychological victory over the unequal treaties imposed by the Western powers in the mid-1800s, the recovery of Hong Kong was a major event in modern Chinese history. Newspapers and posters throughout China celebrated the end of ��a century of shame.�� The front page of the July 1 edition of the China Daily, the PRC��s official international English-language newspaper, read ��Home at Last,�� with the handover photo cropped so that it centered on the Chinese delegation and omitted Patten. In a ninety-seven-page special issue that the Guangzhou Daily promised would become a collector��s item, the newspaper declared that the handover was ��time for the Chinese nation to wash away one hundred years of shame and feel proud and elated!�� The newspaper predicted that July 1 would ��draw attention from all over the world, and be inscribed in history books forever.��
The historic nature and political urgency of the transition was inscribed in the Hong Kong Clock, a gigantic clock installed by the PRC government in 1994 at the entrance to the Museum of Revolutionary History, in the middle of Tiananmen Square, to count down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds to the return of Hong Kong. This placement of the clock, argued China scholar Michael Yahuda in 1996, ��was done as a public reminder to the people of Hong Kong that they were due to be embraced by the motherland under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party before too long.�� Yet the clock was also ticking for Beijing, for by placing the clock in ��a place of such symbolic meaning,�� the PRC government ��elevated the significance of the transfer to a matter of national pride and significance.�� Not only was the clock a warning to the people of Hong Kong that their time under colonial rule was almost up, it became ��a graphic reminder that the resumption of sovereignty and taking this new step towards national reunification involved matters of the highest prestige that the new leaders would have to manage well and manage soon.��16 As art historian Wu Hung wrote in spring 1997, the clock was ��a political statement as well as Beijing��s threatening gesture to Hong Kong.�� A ��political timer,�� the clock warned people in Hong Kong against using democracy as a pretext for trying to subvert Communism in China and ��sharply demarcated�� Hong Kong��s ��two alternative identities���Xa ��foreign colony�� or an ��integral part of the socialist motherland���Xdenying it the possibility of a third, alternative identity of its own.17

Although most people in China had not paid much attention to Hong Kong until then, the final countdown to 1997 was observed with great enthusiasm, including with multiepisodic television documentaries on Hong Kong. In Beijing, more than twelve hundred miles away, some one hundred thousand carefully chosen guests watched President Jiang��s handover speech on gigantic television screens in Tiananmen Square. As the Hong Kong Clock counted down to zero, crowds cheered and fireworks exploded over the square, accompanied by patriotic songs and a traditional lion dance. A poster printed for the occasion showed a smiling Deng Xiaoping, architect of the one country, two systems concept, flanked by the Great Wall of China and Tiananmen Square as he hovered approvingly above Hong Kong��s spectacular harbor and skyline. Another poster showed a mainland Chinese mother clasping her small son, who in turn held up the flag of the new Hong Kong SAR. In the background were representatives of China��s various ethnic minority groups, all joining together to welcome Hong Kong and to celebrate its new political status.
For Hong Kong people, the handover represented a mixture of pride, apprehension, and nostalgia. As the impending transition to Chinese sovereignty approached, many local artists became more concerned with expressing their local identity and their concern with Hong Kong��s uncertain future. One artist, Ho Siu Kee, produced a video performance of a man trying to walk on two balls, suggesting the difficulty of maintaining a balance under the one country, two systems. Another artist, Phoebe Man, produced a satirical mixed-media piece consisting of large Chinese characters repeating the sentence ��I am very excited about the ��97 return of Hong Kong.�� For many other artists, the handover prompted a sense of nostalgia and retrospection, captured in their depictions of certain historical places or moments. Particularly in the immediate months leading up to the transition, this sense of nostalgia extended beyond the artistic community. In March 1997, the Hong Kong government issued its last set of stamps bearing the portrait of Queen Elizabeth. More than eleven thousand stamp collectors, many of whom had waited overnight, descended on the General Post Office; an elderly collector collapsed and died in the frenzy. During the weekend of March 8�V9�Xthe last weekend during which the grounds of Government House, the governor��s official residence, were opened to the public�Xsome one hundred thousand visitors took advantage of this historic occasion.
The different attitudes toward the handover were also manifested in feelings toward emigration, which were shaped by both culture and class. Two years after the handover, sociologist Wong Siu-lun identified four main sets of attitudes toward the reversion to Chinese sovereignty. ��Loyalists,�� who were born in China and came to Hong Kong later in life and who generally hailed from the lower classes, saw the reversion as good for Hong Kong��s and China��s economies and as a means of reuniting families that had been divided since the 1949 revolution. Born to lower- and working-class families and raised in Hong Kong, ��locals�� were younger people who had few family ties to China. Politically neutral but attached to the Hong Kong lifestyle of personal freedom and self-expression, they were ��firmly attached to Hong Kong�� and prepared to ��accept the changeover without fanfare.�� Mostly from working classes, ��waverers,�� who wanted to emigrate but were unable to find countries to accept them, preferred British rule to Chinese rule but were waiting to see what would happen. ��Cosmopolitans,�� usually born in Hong Kong to upper- or middle-class political refugee families that had left China after 1949 and who opposed reunification and preferred British rule, had been planning for 1997 years in advance and already had family ties in the West.18

In March 1996, many people had seized one last opportunity to secure their post-1997 future by lining up outside the Hong Kong Immigration Department to apply for naturalization as British Dependent Territory Citizens. Although this Dependent Territory citizenship would expire on June 30, 1997, naturalization would qualify them for a British National (Overseas) passport. These passports do not grant their holders the right to live in Britain, but they enable them to travel without visas to many countries. In 1990 more than three million Hong Kong people held such passports. The Hong Kong government had announced in 1993 that no more applications for naturalization would be accepted after March 31, 1996, and although few people initially accepted the government��s offer, by late March so many applicants lined up outside the Immigration Department that the department had to stay open twenty-four hours a day. When the department closed at one minute before midnight on March 31, more than fifty-four thousand people had applied for naturalization. This last day became a public spectacle, especially when a group of rowdy young men had the misfortune of cutting in front of an elderly man who happened to be an expert in martial arts.
By early 1997, however, confidence in Hong Kong��s future had increased dramatically. A February survey conducted by the Hong Kong Transition Project at Hong Kong Baptist University found that more than 60 percent of respondents were ��optimistic�� or ��very optimistic�� about Hong Kong��s future, compared with only 6 percent who were ��pessimistic.�� Moreover, more than 60 percent (as opposed to around 40 percent in February 1993) preferred reunification with China rather than remaining a British colony or becoming independent. Satisfaction with the Chinese government had risen to its highest level (38 percent), although this was only slightly greater than half of the approval rating of the Hong Kong government (73 percent). A survey taken in February 1997 by the Ming Pao, a prominent Chinese-language newspaper, showed that the public confidence indicator was as high as it had been before the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Whereas a government survey of November 1994 showed that only 56 percent of the respondents had confidence in Hong Kong��s post-1997 future, a similar survey in April 1997 showed that almost 75 percent of the respondents believed that Hong Kong would remain stable and prosperous after the transition.
Much of this (albeit guarded) confidence and optimism stemmed from Hong Kong and China��s growing economic interdependence and from China��s economic development, which by the late 1980s had helped make Hong Kong the world��s third-largest financial center (after London and New York). According to government reports, in 1996 every day more than 26,000 cars, 20 trains, 72 airplanes, and 800 ships traveled between Hong Kong and China. Whereas only 362 Chinese oceangoing ships had arrived in Hong Kong in 1979, almost 20,000 such ships arrived in the first half of 1997. Encouraged by the PRC government after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in the early 1990s Hong Kong manufacturers relocated even more of their production to Guangdong (in 1979 Hong Kong had almost 900,000 manufacturing employees; by 1997 this number had dropped to around 380,000). Large Hong Kong firms invested in mainland real estate and infrastructure, starting in the Pearl River Delta region but soon spreading throughout China. On the eve of the transition, more than 97,000 Hong Kong residents were working in China.
The largest investor in China, Hong Kong now handled half of China��s exports and almost 60 percent of its total foreign investment and provided one-third of its foreign exchange reserves. And whereas in 1986 China was the third-largest investor in Hong Kong (after the United States and Japan), by 1994 it was investing more than twice as much as the United States and Japan combined. More than seventeen hundred Chinese companies were registered in Hong Kong, where Chinese enterprises hired more than fifty thousand people. The increasing commercial importance of China was also reflected in Hong Kong��s shifting physical landscape. In March 1990, the Bank of China moved to its new headquarters, a seventy-story aluminum-and-glass tower in the Central District designed by renowned Chinese American architect I. M. Pei. Not only did the Bank of China building, then the world��s fifth-tallest building, tower over Hong Kong��s main colonial bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, but it also cost half as much to build.
Whereas Hong Kong people still harbored reservations about China and its lack of political change, as has so often been the case in modern Chinese history there was nothing like the threat of Japanese nationalism to inspire a sense of Chinese nationalism and patriotism. In the summer of 1996, a Japanese right-wing group placed a lighthouse and a Japanese flag on two of the contested Diaoyutai (Senkaku) Islands. When the local Chinese press declared that the Diaoyutai Islands had fallen, Hong Kong people organized marches and demonstrations and protested outside the Japanese consulate. A group from Hong Kong and Taiwan sent two expeditions to the islands. The first expedition ended tragically on September 26 when its leader, the colorful Hong Kong activist David Chan, drowned while trying to swim ashore, but the second expedition managed to evade a Japanese naval blockade and plant the PRC and Taiwan flags on one of the islands. Whereas some observers saw this ��Defend the Diaoyutai�� campaign simply as a media attempt to stir up anti-Japanese feelings, others saw it as a way for Hong Kong people to show their Chineseness.
What had not changed significantly was the concern among many parts of the Hong Kong population that the PRC government would try to interfere in Hong Kong affairs after 1997. In January 1997, the Preparatory Committee chose the new provisional legislature, apportioning approximately half the seats to existing Legislative Council members and some of the remaining half to pro-PRC candidates who had lost in the 1995 Legislative Council elections. In the same month, the legal subgroup of the Preparatory Committee proposed to repeal or amend more than 10 percent of Hong Kong��s 240 existing laws. The February 1997 survey conducted by the Hong Kong Transition Project found that many people were still worried about losing their personal freedom after 1997. In April 1997, the legal subgroup of the Preparatory Committee announced two new post-handover HKSAR ordinances, one requiring demonstrations to have police approval, another requiring local groups to obtain permission for associating with foreign organizations. These measures were widely seen as Beijing��s attempts to limit Hong Kong��s freedoms. Only half an hour after the handover, members of the Democratic Party, realizing that they would lose access to the building at midnight, staged a peaceful demonstration and an appeal for democracy at the Legislative Council building that put them in the international media. Party leader Martin Lee delivered his own handover speech, calling for the ��freedom we are entitled to under the Joint Declaration�� and warning that ��if there is no democracy there will be no rule of law; if there is no freedom, human rights will not be respected.��

The Bank of China (left) towering over the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (right), circa 2000. Courtesy of Alamy Stock Photography.
The handover had an international impact that stretched far beyond Hong Kong. While many Chinese all over the world celebrated, many others, especially those in cities with large Hong Kong Chinese communities, watched in anxiety as the British flag was lowered. Depending on their views toward reunification with the mainland, for people in Taiwan the handover was either a source of inspiration or a chilling warning of what could happen to them next. In East and Southeast Asia, the handover represented the end of colonialism. Even as their own nations�� relations with China improved, many people in these regions saw Hong Kong��s transition to Chinese sovereignty as an ominous sign of China��s expanding power and a potential threat to their own security. Others feared that Chinese rule would make doing business in Hong Kong more difficult by increasing corruption and curtailing political freedoms. The handover was also watched closely by many Japanese, for whom Hong Kong was the most popular tourist destination; they also worried that Hong Kong was to be surrendered to an authoritarian state and were concerned about China��s growing wealth and power in Asia. This explains why on the eve of the handover there were twice as many Japanese journalists as mainland Chinese or British journalists in Hong Kong and why only the local media was larger than the Japanese press corps.
The handover also had important implications for relations between China and the United States. In 1992 the U.S. Congress enacted the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act, which stipulates that the United States would continue to treat Hong Kong as a separate territory after 1997 as long as the president considers Hong Kong ��sufficiently autonomous.�� Also known as the McConnell Act after its author, Republican senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, the act called for bilateral ties with Hong Kong and for the American secretary of state to make regular reports, which in the early 1990s expressed support for democratic reform and freedom of expression. While Washington frequently reminded Beijing of its promise to uphold the one country, two systems concept after 1997, Beijing just as frequently reminded Washington that Hong Kong��s status was a Chinese matter.
Given all the suspicions and mistrust, why did the transfer of sovereignty proceed as smoothly as it did? At the most basic level, Britain was a lame duck and in no position to try to keep Hong Kong, the Chinese government realized that Hong Kong needed to remain prosperous and knew that the handover was being watched all over the world, and the people of Hong Kong could do little to change the course of history. Even as 1997 represented the end of what PRC leaders frequently referred to as China��s ��century of humiliation,�� it represented a new beginning for the PRC as the nation entered an era of rapid economic development, less social control, and improved relations with the rest of the world. The handover was a chance to prove to the world, especially to Taiwan, that China was sincere about the one country, two systems model. The situation was more complicated, however, and involved changing conditions and attitudes in both China and Hong Kong.
Beijing had adopted a new, more conciliatory policy as the handover approached. Hong Kong people��s confidence in China was so low in late 1995 that Larry Yung, son of Chinese vice president Rong Yiren, warned that attempts by mainland officials to interfere in Hong Kong��s affairs after 1997 could ��kill Hong Kong.�� Subsequently, the PRC government began to take a more reassuring stance. The vice director of the New China News Agency local branch compared Hong Kong��s economy to a big cake, insisting that Chinese enterprises were in Hong Kong ��not to divide the cake�� but to make it ��bigger and bigger, sweeter and sweeter.�� Both Lu Ping, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, and Premier Li Peng, reviled by so many in Hong Kong for his role in the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, declared that the CCP would not send a party secretary to supervise Hong Kong��s chief executive. In April 1996, the PRC government invited Anson Chan, who in November 1993 had become the first ethnic Chinese and first female chief secretary of Hong Kong, to Beijing, where Vice Premier Qian Qichen praised Hong Kong��s civil servants and urged them to stay in Hong Kong after 1997. Nor did Chinese officials criticize the large number of Hong Kong people applying for British Dependent Territory Citizenship who, if accepted for naturalization, would have to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth. The Chinese insisted that the elections for Hong Kong��s first chief executive would be open and fair and that the candidate had to be someone acceptable to the people of Hong Kong.
In what Alvin So calls an ��antagonistic alliance,�� Beijing, the new HKSAR government, and the Democratic Party reached a ��democratic compromise�� just before July 1, even as they continued to disagree on ideological and policy issues.19 This understanding was based on an agreement to include all the major parties in the post-1997 elections and on a consensus on the need for continued economic prosperity and political stability. On the eve of the 1997 transition, the three biggest political parties in Hong Kong were the Democratic Party, the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, and the Liberal Party. Headed by Martin Lee, the Democratic Party was prodemocratic and anti-Communist but not opposed to reunification with China (its early slogan was ��democratic reunification��). Its leaders were mostly middle-class professionals critical of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, but the party also enjoyed strong support from lower classes because of its welfare policies. Led by Tsang Yok Sing, principal of a pro-Chinese patriotic school, the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong had strong connections to working-class unions. Despite their different political attitudes toward China, the Democratic Party and the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong were for the most part in agreement regarding policies toward education, housing, health care, education, labor, and welfare. The Liberal Party consisted mainly of businesspeople and professionals. Whereas it had maintained a good relationship with Patten even while maintaining its commitment to reunification with China, it shifted its allegiance toward Beijing as 1997 approached.

1997 IN WORLD HISTORY
Several features made Hong Kong��s transition to Chinese rule in 1997 so distinctive in world history. Not only was it the last significant British colony to decolonize, it was also the most economically successful of British colonies. As Goodstadt writes, Hong Kong��s ��record of sustained and self-generated growth seemed to redeem the reputation of both colonialism and capitalism. The last remnant of the British Empire in Asia had made itself the equal of First World cities against considerable political and economic odds.��20 The transition was prearranged in a way that distinguished it, for example, from the independence of India in 1947 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Nor would the handover lead to independence, as it did in most other European colonies in the decades after World War II. Indeed, to some observers Hong Kong was not being decolonized; rather, it was being recolonized, with the metropole simply shifting from London to Beijing. The most pressing question for the majority of the people in Hong Kong, however, was not how this transition figured in world history but instead whether Hong Kong would indeed be able to keep its distinctive way of life after 1997 under the one country, two systems model.

NOTES
1
Lynn White and Li Cheng, ��China Coast Identities: Regional, National, and Global,�� in Lowell Dittmer and Samuel S. Kim, eds., China��s Quest for National Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 180.
2
Kevin Rafferty, City on the Rocks: Hong Kong��s Uncertain Future (London: Viking, 1989), 7.
3
Quoted in Michael Yahuda, Hong Kong: China��s Challenge (London:
Routledge, 1996), 56. 4
Alvin Y. So, Hong Kong��s Embattled Democracy: A Societal Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 159, 176.
5
White and Li, ��China Coast Identities,�� 190. 6
Leo F. Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners: The Conflict between Public
Interest and Private Profit in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 220. 7
So, Hong Kong��s Embattled Democracy, 215. 8
Frank Ching, ��Misreading Hong Kong,�� Foreign Affairs 73(3) (1997):
54. 9
Reprinted in Alan Knight and Yoshiko Nakano, eds., Reporting Hong
Kong: Foreign Media and the Handover (New York: St. Martin��s, 1999), 195�V97. 10
Ibid., 197�V99. 11
Ibid., 199�V200. 12
Quoted in Allan Knight, ��Will the Chinese Be Kinder about British
Rule? The BBC,�� in Knight and Nakano, Reporting Hong Kong, 120. 13
Reprinted in Knight and Nakano, Reporting Hong Kong, 194�V95. 14
Quoted in Knight, ��Will the Chinese Be Kinder about British Rule?��
122.
15
��Insiders�� Insights,�� in Knight and Nakano, Reporting Hong Kong, 60. 16
Yahuda, Hong Kong, 17, 94�V95.
17
Wu Hung, ��The Hong Kong Clock: Public Time-Telling and Political Time/Space,�� Public Culture 9(3) (Spring 1997): 352, 354.
18
Wong Siu-lun, ��Deciding to Stay, Deciding to Move, Deciding Not to Decide,�� in Gary G. Hamilton, ed., Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 139�V42.
19
So, Hong Kong��s Embattled Democracy, 252.
20
Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners, 4.



Epilogue
Beyond 1997
The burning question surrounding Hong Kong��s reversion to Chinese sovereignty has been how this former British colony will survive under the one country, two systems arrangement. ��Time of Certainty Begins: Will Beijing Honor Vows?�� asked the front page of the New York Times on July 1, 1997. Two years later, political scientist James Hsiung noted that most predictions about Hong Kong��s future after the handover had been ��dismal and downright pessimistic. The worst scenario saw Beijing meddling in Hong Kong��s politics and economic life, and trampling upon its freedoms, including freedom of the press, judicial freedom, academic freedom, and free elections. There would be corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and related plagues, brought in by the Mainland Chinese.��1

As journalist Frank Ching argued in 1999, these doom-and-gloom predictions overlook how People��s Republic of China (PRC) policy toward Hong Kong has always been ��dictated by self-interest.�� China could have recovered Hong Kong much earlier if it had wanted to�Xin 1949 when People��s Liberation Army troops stopped at the Hong Kong border, or during the Cultural Revolution when the central government stopped the Red Guards from crossing into Hong Kong�Xbut the PRC government had good reasons for not wanting to bother Hong Kong. The colony served as a window to the outside world and a base for trade with non-Communist countries, provided a supply of smuggled goods during the American and United Nations embargoes in the 1950s, and aided the PRC��s economic development in the 1970s. Still, Ching acknowledged concerns that the PRC government might interfere in Hong Kong to protect its monopoly on power: ��China��s promise not to interfere in Hong Kong��s internal affairs is similar to a left-handed person promising only to use his right hand. The promise may very well be sincere but, in the absence of restraints, the left-
handed person will sooner or later forget and, without even realizing it, start using his left hand.��2

The most pressing challenges to the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) had little to do with the reversion to Chinese sovereignty. From early 1997 to early 1998, for example, the chicken flu (the H5N1 bird flu virus) killed six people and prompted the HKSAR government to order the slaughter of almost 1.5 million chickens. The Asian financial crisis, caused by currency devaluation in Thailand only one day after the end of British rule in Hong Kong, precipitated a decline in the Hong Kong stock market and property values, unemployment, and a recession from which the HKSAR did not fully recover until 2004. In March 2003, Hong Kong was hit by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an extremely contagious and potentially deadly form of pneumonia. When the disease was finally controlled in June, some eighteen hundred people had been diagnosed with SARS, almost three hundred of whom died. Hong Kong��s tourist industry suffered, which further harmed the region��s economy. The HKSAR government has also faced the problem of keeping Hong Kong economically competitive in a rapidly globalizing world and in the face of increased competition from mainland China, especially since China��s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 has diminished Hong Kong��s traditional position as a doorway to China.
Hong Kong has not only survived the reversion to Chinese sovereignty, but observers also frequently express surprise at how little the region seems to have changed since 1997. Many senior government officials have remained in place. English continues to be the language of success in business and government. Hong Kong��s expatriate community still comprises 2-3 percent of Hong Kong��s population. Most Western expatriates never learn Chinese, still live in better housing and have higher salaries than most local Chinese, and do not plan to stay in Hong Kong for long. British expatriates, some with family ties to Hong Kong dating back to the late 1800s, continue to make more money than they ever could in Britain. Although in 1996 the British government granted the seven thousand South Asians (mostly Indians) in Hong Kong the right of entry and abode in Britain, there is still a sizable Indian community. The Gurkhas, the Nepalese warriors who once fought so proudly for the British Army, no longer serve their colonial masters, but they are now seen throughout Hong Kong as security guards at apartment complexes, office buildings, and shopping malls. (The majority of expatriates, however, have no historical connections to British colonialism: they are the Filipino and Thai women who work as domestic servants for middle- and upper-class Chinese and expatriate families.) Horse racing, protected under the one country, two systems arrangement, enjoys a fanatical popularity almost inexplicable to visitors. The main leisure activities in Hong Kong are still eating and shopping, with restaurants and shopping malls galore. ��Despite the change of guards, and of the emblems,�� James Hsiung concluded in 1999, ��little seemed to have changed for the people in the street.��3

Even while drawing attention to Hong Kong��s uncertain future, the reversion to Chinese sovereignty put the region in the international spotlight in a way that further enhanced its global reputation as a vibrant, cosmopolitan society. In July 2004, a record number of almost two million tourists came to Hong Kong, more than half of them from the mainland. Western tourists also come to Hong Kong in large numbers, although their purpose for coming has changed. Whereas Europeans and Americans used to travel to Hong Kong to catch a glimpse of Communist China across the border, they also came to see traditional China, preserved in the New Territories and seemingly unchanged by the Communist revolution across the border. Now, Western newspapers and magazines brim with articles about Hong Kong, its efforts to promote its heritage, and the dynamic, hybrid flair reflected in its cinema, cuisine, and architecture. The common view of Hong Kong�Xheld mainly by local expatriates�Xas a cultural desert is not true. Orchestras visit from all over the world (especially during the annual Hong Kong Arts Festival), and Hong Kong has its own orchestra, philharmonic, and dance companies as well as a plethora of new museums. Organizations such as the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, founded in 1847 by Governor John Davis, continue to promote interest in Hong Kong��s history and culture.
Compared with many other former colonies, Hong Kong��s postcolonial experience has been remarkably successful. Still, many people in Hong Kong have been disappointed by the region��s brief post-1997 history. Prodemocracy activists and legislators frequently criticize Beijing for slowing Hong Kong��s road to democratization. Some scholars fault Chris Patten��s last-minute reforms that, however well intentioned, appointed a bureaucratic elite that was committed to promoting democracy but unable to handle Hong Kong��s transition from colony to HKSAR. Others blame Hong Kong��s colonial legacies for its current problems. All former colonies have suffered from adjustment problems, but Hong Kong��s unique status�X decolonization without independence�Xhas made it a particularly difficult place to manage. Unlike Hong Kong��s colonial administrators, who by the 1960s enjoyed considerable autonomy from the British government and until then generally paid little attention to public opinion, the HKSAR��s new rulers have the unenviable challenge of satisfying not only the central government in Beijing but also the powerful business interests and the local population within Hong Kong, which, partly because of the changes in the years leading up to 1997, now expect and demand more of their government.
DISSATISFACTION WITH THE HKSAR GOVERNMENT
In the summer of 2002, the HKSAR celebrated its fifth anniversary. Sponsored by the Leisure and Culture Services Department, the celebrations included the Reunification Cup, a series of soccer matches among teams from Hong Kong, Scotland, South Africa, and Turkey. The fireworks display over Victoria Harbour was said to be even more expensive than the one in 1997, which had been the most expensive in history. At ��The Music of the Dragons,�� a concert at Hong Kong Coliseum, more than ten thousand young people from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Macau set a Guinness World Record for the largest percussion performance. A rock concert at Queen Elizabeth Stadium featured bands from Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. The visiting military band of the People��s Liberation Army provided a dance, musical, and marching performance.
Rather than a celebration, for many Hong Kong people the anniversary of the reversion to Chinese sovereignty has been a yearly occasion to express their dissatisfaction with the HKSAR government. On June 30, 1999, the eve of the second anniversary of the reversion, some two hundred people held a candlelight vigil to commemorate the so-called dark days under the HKSAR. Legislative Council member and union leader Lee Cheuk-yan argued that Hong Kong needed a new chief executive. Members of The Frontier, a prodemocracy party, criticized the ��hegemony�� of the new administration. On July 1, political groups and the Hong Kong Federation of Students staged a march to government headquarters in Central District. Wearing black armbands that symbolized ��the demise of the rule of law�� in Hong Kong and bearing pictures of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung, and Security Secretary Regina Ip, the protesters accused the government of ��betraying Hong Kong people�� and ��ruining the rule of law.�� Lau Ka-yee of Democracy 2000, another prodemocracy group, called the one country, two systems concept ��a lie.�� The protesters ended their march by reading a list of the government��s numerous ��sins.�� Democratic Party chairman Martin Lee explained in a press conference that ��the honeymoon is over and the ��two systems�� are being blurred.�� Lee accused Elsie Leung of ��leading the water of mainland law into the common-law well water�� and ��assaulting the common-law system and the rule of law.�� On July 1, 2001, the fourth anniversary of the handover, thousands of prodemocracy activists in several different demonstrations protested against the erosion of democracy since 1997. One group of protesters carried a mock tomb symbolizing ��the death of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law�� in Hong Kong. Another group demanded direct elections for the chief executive, chanting ��one person, one vote.��
Some expatriate former colonial officials have been frustrated with the direction that Hong Kong has taken since the late 1990s. Patrick Hase, who started working in Hong Kong in 1972 and retired as assistant director for social welfare in 1996, believes that morale in the civil service is ��very poor�� and that the ideal of cooperation between government and people ��is disappearing or has perhaps already gone.�� Hase contrasts this with the 1970s and early 1980s, which he considers ��by far the best administered period in Hong Kong��s history, one where the actions of Government were closer to the real wishes of the people than at any date before or since.�� The government was ��in closer contact with the real public opinion then than either before or after.�� Morale was high and relations between government and people were ��excellent,�� while among the government ��the ideals of dedication to an efficient, honest, intelligent and hardworking service imbued with a genuine commitment to the people of Hong Kong were real and keenly felt.��4 James Hayes, who retired as regional secretary of the New Territories in 1987, laments a ��retreat from innocence�� that began in the 1970s as government expanded and become more specialized. Hayes is particularly critical of how the interests of the traditional family and lineage in the New Territories have been increasingly under siege since 1997. Whereas the British policy of governing through a few officials meant that many customary practices were recognized and even protected, the Sino-British Joint Agreement and the Basic Law threaten customary law and the rights and privileges of indigenous residents.5

Criticizing new postcolonial regimes is a common pattern among former colonial servants (many ex-colonials still insist that India was better off under the British), but some of the same prodemocracy leaders who campaigned for political reforms under the British have also compared the HKSAR government unfavorably with the colonial government. In an interview on July 1, 1999, the second anniversary of the handover, Martin Lee argued that whereas ��when the British were here it was a society under the rule of law, now it is the rule of man.�� Emily Lau of The Frontier noted that many Hong Kong people believed that Governor Patten had done a better job than Tung Chee-hwa. And even if they do not compare it with the colonial government, people from all walks of life have regularly expressed their dissatisfaction with the new government. Surveys in the first few years of the HKSAR showed that many people felt that Tung was more interested in helping big business and ingratiating himself than in providing the medical services, care and housing for the elderly, and better housing for the general population that he had promised. On July 1, 1999, a delegation of senior citizens petitioned Tung to honor the vows he had made during his campaign in 1996 to provide better services for the elderly. An opinion poll conducted to mark the anniversary of the reversion found that even while public perceptions of the PRC government had improved, one-third of respondents felt either ��quite negative�� or ��very negative�� about Tung��s government. Less than 20 percent were ��quite positive�� or ��very positive,�� while less than 8 percent felt ��positive�� about the anniversary.

THE ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS CONCEPT AND HONG KONG��S AUTONOMY
Under the one country, two systems arrangement, the PRC government has promised Hong Kong a ��high degree of autonomy�� for fifty years. Surveys in 1998, a year after the handover, showed that a rising public confidence in the HKSAR��s political future, even with the economic recession, was based on satisfaction with Beijing��s noninterference in HKSAR affairs. Even observers in the United States and Taiwan, the two countries that had predicted the bleakest future for Hong Kong, conceded that Beijing had stayed out of Hong Kong affairs.
Both PRC and HKSAR leaders understand that mishandling Hong Kong��s reintegration with the mainland could have disastrous local and international results. It could lead to mass emigration from the HKSAR, which would hurt international investment. Hong Kong is vital to the PRC��s economic development and political stability. Having played up the recovery of Hong Kong into an event of huge national importance, Beijing can hardly afford to ruin it. Not only would a failed Hong Kong be an international embarrassment, but it could even hurt the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself (although some scholars have suggested that the end of colonial Hong Kong also threatens the CCP��s legitimacy since the party is now no longer a vanguard in the struggle against imperialism and oppression). Botching Hong Kong��s reversion would also harm the PRC��s relations with Britain, the United States, Japan, and other Asian nations. Considering that the one country, two systems model was originally designed for Taiwan, ensuring a smooth reversion is also crucial for reunification with Taiwan: a failed reversion would both hurt economic relations with Taiwan and lead to stronger demands for independence there.
Many Hong Kong people, however, believe that the PRC government has intervened far too regularly in the HKSAR��s political affairs. A major concern is Hong Kong��s legal and political autonomy under the one country, two systems arrangement. The Basic Law stipulates that Hong Kong residents of Chinese descent qualify for right of abode (permanent residency) in Hong Kong, provided that at the time of birth at least one parent was a Chinese citizen holding Hong Kong right-of-abode status. In 1997, however, the Provisional Legislative Council passed ordinances restricting the procedures for proving right of abode, which led to court challenges. When the Court of Final Appeal supported the legal challenges in January 1999, the HKSAR government warned that the court��s ruling would extend right-of-abode eligibility to some 1.67 million potential new Chinese immigrants and strain Hong Kong��s resources. (The government claimed that housing and educating the new immigrants would cost more than HK$710 billion, equivalent to around US$91 billion.) The HKSAR government then took its case to the Standing Committee of the National People��s Congress (NPC), prompting an outcry from the Hong Kong legal establishment. Martin Lee accused the government of ��giving away�� Hong Kong��s autonomy. On June 30, the eve of the HKSAR��s third anniversary, six hundred lawyers dressed in black held a silent protest against the interpretation.
The NPC Standing Committee, which is empowered to interpret the Basic Law, sided with the HKSAR government. This led to a massive legal challenge on behalf of more than five thousand applicants for right-of-abode status, who argued that the NPC decision deprived them of the benefits of the Court of Final Appeal ruling. Critics accused the HKSAR. government of manipulating figures and exaggerating strains on housing, employment, and public health to create a climate of fear and encourage public sentiment against immigrants. Pro-Beijing newspapers supported the Standing Committee��s decision, however, insisting that the Court of Final Appeal had made a mistake. The chairman of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, Tsang Yok Sing, argued that the HKSAR government should find the ��best possible way�� to keep the 1.67 million potential immigrants from coming to Hong Kong. Furthermore, although opinion polls after the Standing Committee��s interpretation showed a drop in confidence in the government, they also showed that more than 80 percent of the respondents�Xconcerned about increasing immigration from the mainland�Xwere critical of the court��s decision, while 65 percent supported government action to keep immigrants out. The overwhelming majority, it seemed, preferred the overall welfare of society to the preservation of the law. Accepting the ultimate authority of the Standing Committee to interpret the Basic Law, in January 2002 the Court of Final Appeal reversed its earlier decision by ruling against some claimants on the right-of-abode issue.
In another case that appeared to test Hong Kong��s legal autonomy, in July 2001 the I-IKSAR government allowed Li Shaomin, a Chinese American professor at Hong Kong��s City University, to return after being detained for five months in China. Although Li insisted that he had only been conducting research, he had been convicted in a secret trial for harming China��s national security and spying for Taiwan and had then been expelled from China. Many observers saw Li��s case as part of a wider politically motivated crackdown on academics with connections to the United States, especially since a Chinese scholar based in the United States had been similarly detained. Li��s father, an advisor to CCP leader Hu Yaobang, had been imprisoned for sympathizing with the students after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Although the Hong Kong immigration chief denied having consulted Beijing before making his decision, it was apparent that the HKSAR government had allowed Li to return to Hong Kong because Beijing had let it do so. President George W. Bush and American congressional leaders had urged the Chinese government to release Li, and Secretary of State Colin Powell had just visited Beijing. As Martin Lee put it, ��whoever made the decision knew it was important for Hong Kong and that the whole world was watching.�� While the case suggested proof of the HKSAR��s legal autonomy, some critics cited it as yet another example of Beijing��s�Xand Hong Kong��s�Xwillingness to use legal decisions as political bargaining chips.
Another concern is the future of freedom of expression in Hong Kong. So far, Hong Kong continues to enjoy relatively wide freedom of expression. In March 1999, the Court of Final Appeal overturned the conviction of two men who had been found guilty of desecrating the Chinese national and HKSAR flags. The court argued that their conviction violated the freedom of expression covered by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which under the Basic Law applies to Hong Kong. People in Hong Kong have also been relatively free to criticize the PRC government. When demonstrators protested President Jiang Zemin��s visit on July 1, 1998, the HKSAR police responded simply by playing classical music to drown out the noise. On July 1, 1999, some sixty prodemocracy activists chanting ��Down with Li Peng�� and ��Democracy for China�� interrupted Vice President Hu Jintao��s speech at the unveiling ceremony for a monument commemorating Hong Kong��s reunification with China. On each anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, protesters have held peaceful demonstrations and vigils. On June 4, 2004, tens of thousands of people, among them many mainlanders, attended a rally commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre.
Although freedom of the press is guaranteed by the Basic Law, the PRC government has shown since the years leading up to the handover that it has its own view of what this freedom meant. In May 1996, Lu Ping, director of the Chinese State Council��s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, told American news network CNN that news articles supporting ��two Chinas�� or independence for Hong Kong or Taiwan would ��absolutely not�� be allowed. In October of the same year, Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen promised that the Hong Kong media would enjoy complete freedom and could publish ��criticism,�� but he warned that the media would not be allowed to publish ��rumors or lies�� or personal attacks on Chinese leaders. These and earlier warnings appear to have created an atmosphere of self-censorship. In January 1994, local television station TVB decided not to broadcast a BBC documentary of Mao Zedong that the PRC government had criticized as being biased. A 1996 survey by Chinese University Hong Kong��s Department of Journalism and Communication found that many journalists were reluctant to criticize the PRC government. In 1997 the Hong Kong Journalists Association predicted that self-censorship, rather than direct government intervention, would be more likely to undermine freedom of expression in Hong Kong.6

Still, freedom of the press remains greater in Hong Kong than in many Asian societies, certainly more so than on the mainland. At the NPC annual session in Beijing in spring 1998, Xu Simin, a Hong Kong member of the Chinese People��s Political Consultative Conference, criticized government-run broadcaster RTHK for broadcasting programs critical of the Chinese and Hong Kong governments. But Jiang Zemin warned Hong Kong members of the NPC to stay out of Hong Kong government affairs. And even though Tung Chee-hwa said that while freedom of the press was important, the HKSAR government should be presented favorably, Chief Secretary Anson Chan insisted that RTHK should have its editorial freedom and that this was a local affair. Frank Ching concluded in 1999 that ��freedom of the press continues to thrive, despite prophesies of gloom and doom from both the Western and local media before 1997, most of which continued to look at China through the lens of 1989 events at Tiananmen Square.��7

The problem is that no one is sure how long this press freedom will last or how far its boundaries extend. In August 1999, Xu Simin and Wang Rudeng, assistant director of the New China News Agency local branch, criticized RTHK for giving a representative of the Taiwan regime airtime to argue that China and Taiwan were separate states. Two leaders of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong criticized RTHK for violating the one-China policy enshrined in the Basic Law. Vice Premier Qian Qichen later insisted that support for interstate relations between Taiwan and China violated the one-China principle. In October 2000, President Jiang chided Hong Kong journalists for asking questions about his support for Tung��s reelection in 2002. And after Chen Shui-bian of the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party was elected president of Taiwan in spring 2000, Wang Fengchao, deputy director of the Beijing liaison office in Hong Kong, warned the Hong Kong media not to report on proindependence activities in Taiwan. Although PRC authorities have not specified how they will deal with news groups that violate these prohibitions, there has been a distinct trend toward self-censorship in the local media. (Not all media professionals are as concerned about press freedom: the Hong Kong Federation of Journalists was founded in 1996 by journalists working in the left-wing press to counter the influence of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, which has taken a leading role in defending press freedom.)
A particularly sensitive issue has been the PRC and HKSAR governments�� concerns about seditious and subversive activities in Hong Kong. Beijing has insisted that Hong Kong must not become a base for subversive activities against China, and in early 2001 Security Secretary Regina Ip declared that her government was keeping a ��close eye�� on the Falun Gong (Practice of the Wheel of Law). A quasi-religious organization that combines Buddhist meditation with traditional Chinese qigong (breathing and movement exercise) techniques, the Falun Gong has been banned in mainland China since 1999 as an ��evil cult.�� But the Falun Gong is legal in Hong Kong, where it is registered with the Societies Ordinance and its members often hold peaceful demonstrations against the widespread suppression of the movement on the mainland. Over the course of 2001, Tung Chee-hwa shifted from calling the Falun Gong ��more or less�� to ��without a doubt�� an ��evil cult.�� Executive Council member Nellie Fong encouraged the government to pass an antisedition law to monitor the Falun Gong. In May 2001, the HKSAR government formally announced its intention to draft an anticult law, the presumed target being the Falun Gong. The announcement provoked a controversy in the local media. In late June, Chief Secretary Donald Tsang (who had recently replaced Anson Chan) abruptly withdrew the anticult proposal, insisting that the HKSAR administration would pursue the matter in ��the Hong Kong way.��
In March 2002, eight Falun Gong followers were arrested in a March demonstration outside the PRC central government��s local liaison office; the eight were later convicted for assaulting and obstructing police. In September, during his second term, Tung Chee-hwa tried to introduce an antisedition and antisubversion bill, at the insistence of Beijing and as stipulated in Article 23 of the Basic Law, which gives the HKSAR government the right to ��prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People��s Government�� and to prohibit local political organizations from having any contact with foreign political organizations. As the colonial government had in the late 1980s, the HKSAR government published a public consultation paper listing the main provisions of the proposed legislation. One provision allowed the government to ban any organizations that were illegal on the mainland (such as the Falun Gong). After large public demonstrations both for and against the proposed legislation, in early 2003 the HKSAR government announced that the Legislative Council would vote on the bill in July before the current legislative session ended.
In the meantime, in March 2003 Hong Kong was struck by SARS. Even while facing a barrage of criticism for not recognizing the disease earlier and for downplaying reports that the infection was coming from the mainland, the HKSAR government decided to go ahead with the controversial security bill. With confidence in the government plummeting, the timing for reintroducing the bill could not have been worse. On July 1, the sixth anniversary of Hong Kong��s transition to Chinese sovereignty, more than five hundred thousand people staged the largest public demonstration in the young HKSAR��s history. Even more embarrassing for the government, new premier Wen Jiabao was in town for the anniversary and to witness the signing of a new free trade agreement between China and Hong Kong.
Although Tung agreed to withdraw the provision enabling the HKSAR government to ban organizations that were illegal on the mainland, he stuck to his guns on the rest of the security bill. When critics of the bill called for his resignation, Tung agreed to defer the vote. After a meeting in Beijing with Wen Jiabao, new president and CCP general secretary Hu Jintao, and Vice President Zeng Qinghong in Beijing, in August Tung announced that the government would reintroduce a modified version of the security bill for public consultation. However, after pressure from critics of the bill and even from his own supporters, Tung withdrew the bill in early September. The fallout from the security bill controversy also affected the November 2003 District Council elections. Although the mainland and local pro-Beijing media condemned them as unpatriotic, many prodemocracy candidates won election, and candidates supportive of the security bill were defeated.
In early May 2005, the Court of Final Appeal overturned criminal convictions against the eight Falun Gong followers accused of assaulting and obstructing police in the 2002 protest. In its summary, the court declared that ��the freedom to demonstrate peacefully is a constitutional right�� and that freedom of expression is ��at the heart of Hong Kong��s system and the courts should give them a generous interpretation.�� Still, local human rights advocates worry that Hong Kong��s judicial system is being undercut by the PRC government��s power to interpret the Basic Law in ways that might preempt decisions by Hong Kong courts (as it did, for example, by blocking rapid democratic reforms and limiting eligibility for right of abode). Law Yuk-kai, director of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, warned after the May 2005 ruling that Hong Kong��s courts could be ��completely sidelined.�� And many people worry that the Falung Gong case will cause Beijing to take a tougher stance toward less subversive activities in Hong Kong.
Despite its promise of a ��high degree of autonomy,�� the Beijing government has already taken several measures to limit the growth of democracy in Hong Kong. In late 2003, President Hu Jintao warned Tung Chee-hwa that the issue of electoral reforms could not move ahead without prior consultation with Beijing. On April 6, 2004, the Standing Committee of the NPC ruled that any local attempts to modify election laws would require approval from Beijing, that the Hong Kong chief executive could not introduce any electoral reforms bills without approval from the Standing Committee, and that the Legislative Council could not introduce electoral reform legislation. After local opposition parties condemned the ruling as a violation of the one country, two systems model, on April 26 the Standing Committee declared that direct elections for chief executive or the Legislative Council violated the Basic Law, thus ruling out the possibility of popular elections for chief executive in 2007 and for expanded elections for the legislature in 2008.
Most people in Hong Kong appear to have resigned themselves to the fact that the Chinese government has ultimate authority over Hong Kong��s constitutional reform. On July 1, 2004, the seventh anniversary of the transition, hundreds of thousands of people protested the PRC government��s decision to prohibit general elections. A survey in the spring of 2004 found that public dissatisfaction with the Hong Kong government��s handling of relations with the central authorities in Beijing was at its highest level since the 1997 handover. But it is difficult to tell how much the demand for political reform reflects popular opinion in Hong Kong. In the first post-handover elections for the Legislative Council in September 1998, approximately 53 percent of registered voters turned out. In the second elections in September 2000, only around 44 percent of voters turned out; the Democratic Party lost quite a bit of support. An opinion poll in May 2004 showed that the support for universal suffrage in the 2007 and 2008 elections had declined steeply since July 2003.

COLONIALISM AND ITS LEGACIES
How did being a British colony for more than 150 years affect Hong Kong��s history? What are the legacies of colonialism? Despite its rocky start, Hong Kong��s status as a British colony and free port helped make it into a thriving commercial center. The rule of law and political stability encouraged both Chinese and foreign investment, while Hong Kong��s colonial status protected it from many of the troubles that plagued China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the Hong Kong government had more than its share of corruption, its generally efficient and nonpolitical civil service frequently drew praise from the various regimes on the mainland. Under British rule, Hong Kong also achieved a high standard of living for many of its inhabitants. By the early 1990s, Hong Kong��s per capita income had surpassed Britain��s. The region enjoys one of the world��s lowest infant mortality rates and has extremely high life expectancy rates.
During the countdown to 1997, the Western media depicted Hong Kong as a bastion of democracy, free expression, and prosperity, often ignoring how for so long Hong Kong had been a colony with little democracy or freedom of expression. But any assessment of the British colonial legacy must consider the entire colonial period rather than only the last decade or so of British rule, when the British introduced last-minute political reforms. Although colonial Hong Kong was theoretically based on the rule of law, some jurists and legal scholars argue that common law has never taken root in Hong Kong, mainly because it is so different from the traditional Chinese legal system, while others suggest that most people in colonial Hong Kong had only a superficial knowledge of common law because the language of the law was English (trials are often still held in English, as many judges are expatriates and most counsels received their legal training in English). Furthermore, the government enacted a wave of anti-Chinese legislation from the earliest years, passed various emergency and discriminatory ordinances, and often censored the Chinese press. The 1951 Control of Publications Ordinance, which made it an offense to publish anything that might incite people to commit sedition or treason, was not repealed until 1987. As journalist C. K. Lau argues, Hong Kong��s ��supposedly high degree of press freedom�� should be ��better understood as allowing the press great latitude to comment on Chinese politics, but not on the legitimacy of British rule.��8

Hong Kong��s colonial civil service was generally efficient and politically neutral, but until the last years Europeans dominated senior positions on the grounds that Chinese were not qualified or trustworthy enough. Political power, writes Leo Goodstadt, ��was controlled by colonial officials, alien in both language and culture who, with the other members of this European minority, enjoyed superior status and influence solely on account of their race.�� Because they were so isolated from the Chinese community, ��expatriates were in no position to identify the frustrations and the aspirations of their constituents, their fears as well as their hopes.�� Because these expatriates had little knowledge of life in public housing estates, for example, standards of housing and social services ��fell well below what Hong Kong could afford even after its prosperity was assured by its export triumphs.��9 Similarly, James Hsiung argues that because they were not problems facing expatriates, the colonial government had little concern about Hong Kong��s inordinate income-distribution inequities, ��the very problem of abject poverty amidst affluence��; the ��scandalous�� condition of the elderly living in poverty; and the lack of unemployment insurance, which the government believed would only encourage laziness. ��The sad thing,�� laments Hsiung, ��is that this lack of compassion perpetuated by colonial policy as such has rubbed off on the British-educated local elite even into the postcolonial era.��10

Hong Kong has often been described as a capitalist��s paradise and as one of the world��s freest and most competitive economies. But this economy historically depended on political patronage and discriminatory monopolies that favored large British firms. Directors of large British firms such as Jardine and Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and the Swire Group regularly held seats on the Executive Council and the Legislative Council. Cable and Wireless, a British corporation, had the telephone monopoly until very recently. Well after World War II, the colonial government refrained from encouraging industrialization because it violated official colonial policy of stressing trade and commerce. The overrepresentation of business and professional classes in the colonial power structure also restricted competition in the property market. As historian Ming Chan puts it, free trade and free enterprise ��did not always mean fair trade and equal opportunity.��11

Free-market economists frequently praise Hong Kong��s laissez-faire system, but this commitment to laissez-faire enabled the colonial government to shirk many of its responsibilities. Compulsory and free primary education was not guaranteed until 1971, and three years of compulsory and free secondary education was not guaranteed until 1978. Nor did the colonial administration have a shining record in higher education. Until the mid-1980s�Xthe last decade of British rule�Xless than 5 percent of high school graduates could attend degree-granting institutions. (By 1997 the number had risen to 18 percent after the number of degree-granting institutions increased by four times.) And even though by the 1990s more than 40 percent of Hong Kong��s population owned their apartments, at least three hundred thousand people were still living in squatter huts. Although the colonial government frequently justified its low social welfare spending on budgetary grounds, in the postwar period the government faced only a handful of budget deficits. By the end of British rule, writes Goodstadt, ��most of the adult population had been reared, educated and spent much of their working lives in an environment disadvantaged and even impoverished by the failure to upgrade the social infrastructure in line with economic growth.�� The colonial government was so successful in ��making laissez faire and minimal economic and social intervention an integral part of the Hong Kong outlook,�� Goodstadt argues, ��that not a single serious political party in Hong Kong sought to challenge the legitimacy of this old-fashioned set of doctrines or their primacy in economic management before 1997.��12

The British will be remembered for their many contributions to Hong Kong, but they will also be remembered for their many failures. Anna Wu, a lawyer who in 1975 helped found the Hong Kong Observers, a pressure group dedicated to discussing contemporary issues, and who was appointed by Patten to the Legislative Council in 1992, argues that Murray MacLehose��s refusal to introduce elections to the Legislation Council during his tenure was ��disastrous�� for Hong Kong. Such reforms would have given Hong Kong a ��much more stable and more mature alternative�� to colonial rule and would have prepared Hong Kong much better for the post-1997 HKSAR government. Politics, Wu maintains, would have ��been part of our lives and culture, not a new concept.�� By not introducing democracy until the 1990s, the colonial government actually legitimized the PRC government��s opposition to political changes.13 Thus, it is not only Beijing that is to blame for the HKSAR��s problems. Rather, argues Ming Chan, ��the inadequate foundation, unhealthy political culture, flawed legal-administrative framework and questionable bureaucratic practices inherited from the British�Xtogether with the inability of the Hong Kong people to stand firmly to defend their much cherished freedom, democracy and high degree of autonomy because of their colonial deprivation�Xought to be blamed as well.��14

Colonial officials often blamed Hong Kong��s retarded political culture on its Chinese residents, their traditional culture, and their refugee mentality. Historian David Faure disagrees: ��Confucianism no more dictates the evolution of the economy or the evolution of politics in Hong Kong or anywhere else in East Asia than Christianity may be said to be the driving force of such in Europe and America.�� Rather, Faure argues, ��the failure to widen the franchise in the late 1940s and early ��50s deprived all of Hong Kong of any effective channel of politicking.�� Realizing that there was no room for them in Hong Kong��s administrative structure, Hong Kong people exerted their power in the few arenas where they could, such as business and the professions, thereby creating ��the impression that Hong Kong people were apolitical.��15 Similarly, Leo Goodstadt rejects as ��blaming the victims�� the standard argument that Chinese political apathy was a legitimate reason for not introducing political reforms. ��A more accurate explanation of why Hong Kong had no directly-elected members of its legislature until the final decade of British rule was to be found in a colonial culture that combined self-satisfied complacency with mistrust of the local population.�� Because the British ��lacked the confidence to allow the public to participate directly in the political process,�� Goodstadt argues, Hong Kong ��remained a constitutional anachronism whose political arrangements remained virtually unchanged from the previous century until the final decade of the colonial era.��16

To claim, however, as some observers have, that the interest in politics in the 1980s and 1990s entirely disproves the common image of Hong Kong people as historically being politically apathetic is anachronistic. Demands for reform in the 1980s and 1990s were shaped by Hong Kong��s changing social, economic, and political conditions, in particular the rise of a local identity, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and the local reactions to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. By this time, Hong Kong was a different place, its citizens a different people. Furthermore, if Hong Kong people deserve much of the credit for Hong Kong��s economic prosperity and political stability, they must also bear some of the blame for its poor housing conditions and social services, repressive education system, and weak political culture. If the Hong Kong public was indeed as resentful of the colonial administration��s poor record in terms of social services and political reform as critics sometimes charge, it could have demanded more from its government. Political and social activists in the 1970s often encountered resentment and resistance from all classes of the Chinese community who, insisting that conditions in Hong Kong were already much better than in China, warned against becoming involved in politics and causing trouble for the government.
The end of British rule did not give Hong Kong a fresh start. On the contrary, Beijing is committed to keeping Hong Kong��s political structure in the form it had assumed by the last years of the colonial era, especially the functional constituency model for the new Legislative Council because legislators from these constituencies consistently vote against any measures to promote democratic reforms, civil liberties, or political accountability. In his July 1, 1997, speech celebrating the establishment of the HKSAR, Tung Chee-hwa explained that the Basic Law ��reaffirms the implementation of a different system within one country�� and ��protects the rights and lifestyle of Hong Kong people and delineates our obligations.��17 But some critics argue that the Basic Law prevents the HKSAR from modifying or expanding its welfare and economic policies to fit the needs of changing times and that it has expanded the role of the business elite, especially from the property sector, in Hong Kong��s power structure. According to Goodstadt, the Basic Law has made it hard for the HKSAR government to break from the old laissez-faire doctrine, guaranteeing that Hong Kong��s economy ��should be managed along the most conservative lines.��18

One considerably less controversial legacy of colonialism in Hong Kong is the English language, which continues to be important in government, business, and the professions and which according to the Basic Law will remain an official language in the HKSAR. Despite controversial and not entirely successful efforts by the government to promote the study of Mandarin (or Putonghua), there is little doubt that English will survive in Hong Kong. Unlike some postcolonial societies, there have been no attempts in Hong Kong to eradicate English for nationalist or political reasons. Far from being condemned as the language of the colonial oppressor, English is widely regarded as crucial for maintaining Hong Kong��s status as a regional headquarters to multinational companies (even while many of these companies have opened offices in mainland China) and as the language of success in the business, financial, and professional communities. When the Hong Kong government decreed shortly before the handover that Chinese would be the language of instruction for most schools after 1998, many schools and parents opposed the decree. And while learning Mandarin is becoming increasingly important for doing business with the mainland, a command of English will always be an important asset for another valuable prize: emigrating to English-speaking countries.
While the role of English as the language of the colonial administration helped make Hong Kong an international city, the weak command of English in Hong Kong is also a legacy of colonial rule. Some educators and employers have noted a decline in the quality of English since 1997, but longtime observers realize that the level of English in Hong Kong has always been low. It is not only poorly trained teachers employing ineffective and outdated teaching methods who are to blame; the weak command of English is also a result of Hong Kong��s divided colonial social structure. As C. K. Lau argues, ��the English-speaking community and the Chinese-speaking community have always lived parallel but largely separate lives.�� Thus, there are ��virtually no opportunities for most Hong Kong Chinese to use the English they learn at school in real life.�� Unlike in Singapore, where the postcolonial government has promoted the use of English both to strengthen Singapore��s status as a shipping and trading center and to achieve racial harmony among that city-state��s multiethnic population, ��English is not a language that the average Hong Kong Chinese use spontaneously as a means of communication.��19


THE LEADERSHIP PROBLEM
One of the most serious weaknesses of Hong Kong��s post-1997 political system is also a legacy from the colonial period. This weakness, in the words of Lau, is the HKSAR��s ��failure to produce political leadership.��20 In January 2001, Anson Chan, Hong Kong��s highly popular chief secretary, suddenly announced that she would resign in May, a year before her contract expired. Known for disagreeing with Tung Chee-hwa about the pace of democratic reforms and for defending press freedom in Hong Kong, Chan had earlier declared that she would resign before approving policies that would compromise her principles. In July 2003, two of the most unpopular members of Tung��s cabinet resigned. On July 16, 2003, Security Secretary Regina Ip resigned after the July 1 demonstration against her proposed National Security Bill. Hours later, Financial Secretary Antony Leung, who was already under fire for failing to reduce Hong Kong��s high unemployment rate and to restore consumer confidence in the economy, stepped down. Leung had been criticized for purchasing a luxury Lexus automobile just before delivering the 2003 budget, which included increasing the tax rate on new cars. Although Leung insisted that he had decided to increase the tax, which would have cost him HK$50,000 (US$6,400), only after purchasing his new car, the case embarrassed the HKSAR government and hurt its credibility, especially when the government seemed so unwilling to investigate the case, which became known as ��Lexusgate.�� In July 2004, two top health officials stepped down after a Legislative Council report on the SARS epidemic of 2003 found that the government had been slow in trying to contain the contamination from SARS.
The premature resignation of Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong��s first postcolonial head of government, is only the most celebrated example of this leadership problem. Although Tung insisted that he was stepping down for health reasons, his resignation in March 2005, during the second half of his second five-year term, was widely seen as proof that he had failed to please the PRC government. Tung had lost his main backer in Beijing, former president Jiang Zemin, while new president Hu Jintao, faced with complaints from Hong Kong��s business tycoons about Tung��s performance, felt no obligation to retain him. In December 2004, Hu had publicly criticized Tung after legal challenges prevented the HKSAR government from making a major sale of government-owned land. As Hong Kong-based editor Hugo Restall explains, Tung was also losing ��even the small semblance of control he once enjoyed over his cabinet.�� Tung resigned just in time for the Selection Committee, whose term was to expire in mid-July 2005, to pick his successor. Had he waited any later to resign, argues Restall, Beijing would have had to form a new selection committee, drawing unwanted attention to the undemocratic nature of the selection process.21

If Tung Chee-hwa had a hard time as chief executive of Hong Kong, his successor, former chief secretary Donald Tsang, also has his work cut out for him. Tsang, who in 1995 had been the first Chinese to become financial secretary, had the greatest public approval of any member of Tung��s cabinet. Tsang also enjoys the support of the business magnates who urged Beijing to remove Tung. Like the PRC leaders, these tycoons oppose greater democratic reform in Hong Kong. The PRC leaders fear that democratization in Hong Kong might fuel demands for the same on the mainland, while both PRC leaders and the local business moguls worry that democratization would result in higher taxes and in demands for more government spending. Thus, Tsang will have to perform a very careful balancing act: not alienating his business supporters, proving his loyalty to China after so many years of dedicated service to the British (for which he was knighted in 1997), and satisfying the ordinary people who, writes Restall, ��are fed up with government and business elites colluding to determine Hong Kong��s future without popular input.��22 If the experience of the Tung administration is any lesson, it is the people of Hong Kong who will be shortchanged in this delicate balancing act.
In November 2005, Tsang announced that he had appointed 153 members of the public, including prodemocracy legislators such as Democratic Party leader Lee Wing-tat, to join the Commission on Strategic Development, the HKSAR advisory group that is studying how to expand democratic reforms in Hong Kong. Only three weeks earlier, Tsang had been criticized and ridiculed by prodemocracy lawmakers for comparing Hong Kong��s slow progress toward universal suffrage with the United States, where women did not gain the right to vote until well more than a century after the United States won its independence. Surely, critics such as barrister and legislator Ronny Tong asked, Tsang was not suggesting that it might take Hong Kong another century to achieve universal suffrage. Prodemocracy critics have also rejected any assertions that Hong Kong is not ready for democracy, and Tsang��s insistence that democratization in Hong Kong must be a gradual process that cannot take place without the approval of the authorities in Beijing, noting that other former colonies and Communist countries have had democracy for years. Other critics have complained that Tsang, despite his own humble origins and professed interest in democratization, has continued his predecessor��s habit of appointing mainly older businessmen and bankers to his cabinet.

HONG KONG AND MAINLAND CHINA
Eclipsed by the concerns and speculations about Hong Kong��s new status, a less frequently asked question is what Hong Kong��s reversion to Chinese sovereignty has meant for people in China. On the eve of the 1997 reversion, many observers predicted that because the PRC would have to tolerate some autonomy for Hong Kong, this would lead other areas of China to copy what has made Hong Kong so successful. But China itself is changing so quickly that Hong Kong��s reversion is unlikely to have much of an effect on the mainland. Although the official mainland media covered the countdown to the handover with special television shows and documentaries about Hong Kong, it now rarely even comments on the anniversary of Hong Kong��s return. Indeed, having reverted to Chinese sovereignty, Hong Kong has lost much of its distinctive quality, a distinctiveness that becomes less prominent every year as mainland cities become more developed. At the same time, Hong Kong remains a foreign place to many mainlanders. Until the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement between Hong Kong and Guangdong in 2003 and the ��individual tourism�� scheme introduced in autumn 2003 for mainland visitors from Guangdong, other neighboring provinces, and various major Chinese cities, obtaining an entry permit to Hong Kong could be harder than to many overseas countries. Flights to Hong Kong usually depart from the international section of mainland airports, and Hong Kong companies still enjoy tax breaks and other benefits reserved for foreign investors.
In the past decade, Hong Kong and Guangdong have become more closely integrated than at any time since the 1949 revolution in China, so much so that anthropologist Gregory Guldin has predicted the emergence of a giant ��Pearl River megalopolis�� that includes Guangzhou, Macau, Hong Kong, and some smaller mainland cities.23 More people than ever before travel across the border between Hong Kong and Guangdong, especially to Shenzhen, while intermarriage�Xmainly between Hong Kong men and mainland wives�Xhas helped change the texture of Hong Kong society. Although mainlanders in Hong Kong are still sometimes treated as bumpkins who cut in line at bus stops and fast food restaurants and are often blamed for Hong Kong��s rising crime rates, they also comprise the majority of Hong Kong��s tourists and are the new big spenders in the region��s department stores.
These changes are reflected in how Hong Kong people view mainlanders and themselves. Surveys in the early 1990s found that Hong Kong Chinese considered mainlanders poor, lazy, unfriendly, superstitious, coarse, uncultured, and unintelligent, while mainlanders found Hong Kong people arrogant, hypocritical, and unfriendly. The surveys also found that these negative impressions increased the more often the two groups came into contact with each other. Such feelings appear to have been particularly strong among Hong Kong��s youth. Polls in January and May 1996 showed that only one-fifth of the young people surveyed considered mainlanders to be reliable, and more than three-quarters identified themselves first as Hong Kongese rather than Chinese. With China��s rising profile in the international arena and the emphasis on patriotic education and propaganda, however, Chinese nationalist and patriotic feelings have become pronounced in Hong Kong.
Even as more and more Hong Kong people are beginning to identify themselves primarily as Chinese rather than as Hong Kong Chinese or Hong Kongers, they often see themselves, and Hong Kong, as being culturally and politically distinct. Unlike people in mainland China (or in the United States), most Hong Kong people have not grown up with various forms of political indoctrination, such as singing national anthems or pledging allegiance to flags. Thus, they sometimes have a hard time identifying politically with China, especially with its Communist regime. The right-of-abode controversy was ostensibly about the autonomy of the Hong Kong judicial system under a new government, but it was also about who qualified as Hong Kong Chinese: many local residents insisted that the mainlanders had no right to settle in Hong Kong. In May 2005, the HKSAR government announced that it intended to raise public hospital charges to deter mainland women from trying to obtain residency for their children by giving birth there. Mainland women, the government explained, accounted for more than 30 percent of births in public hospitals, and the government was determined not to subsidize medical services for nonresidents at the expense of local residents.

HISTORY IN HONG KONG
Hong Kong��s history did not, of course, end with the colonial period any more than it began with the colonial period. History has in fact become a crucial and ongoing theme in how the new government has tried to smooth Hong Kong��s reunification with China. But this has opened up a host of complicated questions. How, for example, can reunification with mainland China be reconciled with Hong Kong��s status as a place whose history was shaped for more than 150 years by not being politically part of China? How are some of the more turbulent events in PRC history to be treated, especially when they have been viewed with such abhorrence by so many people in Hong Kong, not to mention having caused so many people in the PRC to seek refuge in Hong Kong? The answer has been a curious blend of promoting Chinese nationalism by revising, glossing over, or downplaying much of PRC history while emphasizing Hong Kong��s historical distinctiveness.
When school began in September 1997, the Chinese history textbooks in Hong Kong were noticeably thinner than in previous years. In late 1995, Beijing had called for general changes in Hong Kong textbooks, but in early 1997 Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen declared that history textbooks should be rewritten ��to suit the changes after 1997.�� Responding to appeals from Beijing, local publishers deleted or reduced topics that might be offensive or controversial: for example, Taiwan and Tibet history, the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, and the democracy movements in China during the late 1970s and in 1989. The Tiananmen Square Massacre was rephrased as merely an ��incident�� rather than a ��crackdown.�� The new textbooks devoted considerably more space to the Opium Wars, which in pre-1997 textbooks had often been described as little more than a trade conflict, and to the Cultural Revolution, which had affected several of China��s leaders.
The HKSAR government has tried to put aside turbulent parts of Hong Kong��s history that are linked to the PRC. Shortly after the reversion to Chinese sovereignty, Tung Chee-hwa invited several elderly leftists involved in the 1967 riots to a tea reception at Government House, where he commended them for their ��outstanding contributions to Hong Kong society.�� Some of the men had worked for pro-Beijing newspapers in Hong Kong; others had been members of the famous East River Column during World War II. In July 1999, the government awarded Lee Chark-tim, who in 1967 had been president of the pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions and a member of the Anti-British Struggle Committee, the I-IICSAR��s top honor: the Grand Bauhinia Medal. One of Lee��s comrades, Wong Kin-lap, received the Golden Bauhinia Star. In July 2000, Liu Yat-yuen, who had also been a member of the Anti-British Struggle Committee, was awarded the Silver Bauhinia Star. In July 2001, the Hong Kong Security Bureau rescinded deportation orders against several people who had been deported in the 1950s and 1960s as radical leftists. Lo Tong, then principal at a pro-Beijing, patriotic middle school, had been deported in 1950 for raising the PRC flag and singing the national anthem at his school. Tsang Chiu-for, the highest-ranking Chinese police officer in Hong Kong at the time, had been deported in 1961 on suspicion of being a Communist spy. The government also awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal to Yeung Kwong who, as chairman of the pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions and nominal head of the Anti-British Struggle Committee, had led a group of protesters in chanting anti-British slogans outside Government House. The awards were widely criticized by the public and the press as an attempt to vindicate the riots as a legitimate anti-British movement and appease pro-Beijing forces in Hong Kong. Pro-Beijing newspapers and legislators defended the awards, however, arguing that the radical leftists�� role in the 1967 disturbances should not overshadow their subsequent contributions to Hong Kong.
For the historian, perhaps the most interesting way in which history figures in the ongoing process of Hong Kong��s reunification with China is the HKSAR government��s effort to use history and heritage preservation to promote a sense of Hong Kong localness and belonging within a larger sense of Chinese nationalism. Since 1997, several new museums have been devoted to Hong Kong��s history, all run by the government��s Leisure and Cultural Services Department. The main exhibit at one of these new museums, ��The Hong Kong Story�� at the Hong Kong Museum of History, introduces Hong Kong��s natural and cultural heritage since prehistoric times with dioramas, reconstructed street scenes, films, and interactive exhibits. Here visitors can learn about Hong Kong��s rich history through a variety of exhibits: boarding a fishing boat that rocks gently to the sounds of straining ropes, strolling through a traditional Cantonese village, or witnessing the horror and suffering during the Japanese occupation. Visitors can also help commemorate the reversion to Chinese sovereignty in an exhibit that includes an excerpt from Jiang Zemin��s handover speech and ends with the handover fireworks display, with Hong Kong��s trademark night skyline in the background. As the last caption in this ��Hong Kong Story�� notes, even though the museum exhibit ends with the reversion to Chinese sovereignty, ��the Hong Kong story will continue to be written.��

NOTES
1
James C. Hsiung, ��The Paradox Syndrome and Update,�� in James C. Hsiung, ed., Hong Kong the Super Paradox: Life after Return to China (New York: St. Martin��s, 2000), 1.
2
Frank Ching, ��The Hong Kong Press: A Post-1997 Assessment,�� in Hsiung, Hong Kong the Super Paradox, 163�V66.
3
James C. Hsiung, ��The Hong Kong SAR: Prisoner of Legacy or History��s Bellwether?�� in Hsiung, Hong Kong the Super Paradox, 308.
4
Patrick Hase, ��The District Office,�� in Elizabeth Sinn, ed., Hong Kong, British Crown Colony, Revisited (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies,
University of Hong Kong, 2001), 134, 144�V45.
5
James Hayes, ��Colonial Administration in British Hong Kong and Chinese Customary Law,�� in Sinn, Hong Kong, 71. 6
��Insiders�� Insights,�� in Alan Knight and Yoshiko Nakano, eds.,
Reporting Hong Kong: Foreign Media and the Handover (New York: St. Martin��s, 1999), 155�V56.
7
Ching, ��Hong Kong Press,�� 154. 8
C. K. Lau, Hong Kong��s Colonial Legacy: A Hong Kong Chinese��s View of the British Heritage (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1997), 158�V 59.
9
Leo F. Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners: The Conflict between Public Interest and Private Profit in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 8, 27, 29.
10
Hsiung, ��Hong Kong SAR,�� 316. 11
Ming K. Chan, ��The Legacy of the British Administration of Hong
Kong: A View from Hong Kong,�� China Quarterly 151 (September 1997): 576. 12
Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners, 7, 122. 13
Anna Wu, ��Government by Whom?�� in Sally Blyth and Ian
Wotherspoon, Hong Kong Remembers (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996), 165.
14
Chan, ��Legacy of the British Administration,�� 582. 15
David Faure, Colonialism and the Hong Kong Mentality (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 2003), 2, 37.
16
Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners, 11, 32. 17
Knight and Nakano, Reporting Hong Kong, 202.
18
Goodstadt, Uneasy Partners, 134. 19
Lau, Hong Kong��s Colonial Legacy, 109�V12. 20
Ibid., 54. 21
Hugo Restall, ��Beijing Takes Control of Hong Kong,�� Far East
Economic Review 168(3) (March 2005): 40. 22
Ibid., 42. 23
Gregory Eliyu Guldin, ��Toward a Greater Guangdong: Hong Kong��s
Sociocultural Impact on the Pearl River Delta and Beyond,�� in Reginald Yin-Wang Kwok and Alvin Y. So, eds., The Hong Kong-Guangdong Link: Partnership in Flux (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1995), 113�V14.



Chronology of Key Events
111 BCE Southern Yue Kingdom defeated by Emperor Han Wu Di. Gradual migration of Han Chinese to the Hong Kong region.
1200s�V1300s Increased migration to Hong Kong during the Yuan dynasty.
1600s-early 1800s Hong Kong becomes more closely linked with the rest of China.
Early 1800s Pirate Zhang Baozai uses Hong Kong Island as a base.
1834 Lord Napier urges Britain to take possession of Hong Kong Island. End of East India Company��s monopoly over trade with China.
March 1839 Lin Zexu launches antiopium campaign.
November 1839 First Opium War begins.
January 26, 1841 British claim sovereignty over Hong Kong Island in accordance with disputed Convention of Chuenpi.
February 2, 1841 Charles Elliot proclaims that Hong Kong will be a free port and that all inhabitants will be allowed to retain their religions and customs.
February 1842 British Superintendency of Trade moves to Hong Kong from Macau.

August 29, 1842
June 1843
July 1844 1847 1849
1850s
1851�V1864 October 1856
Early 1857
January 15, 1857 December 1857 January
1858October 1861 Treaty of Nanking cedes Hong Kong Island to Britain ��in perpetuity.��
Treaty of Nanking ratified by Britain and China; Hong Kong declared a British colony.
Colonial treasurer Robert Montgomery Martin urges British government to abandon Hong Kong.
Establishment of Man Mo Temple.
Gold discovered in California; first shipload of Chinese laborers comes through Hong Kong.
Sino-British relations plagued by dispute over British access to Canton. British seek more trading and diplomatic concessions from China.
Taiping Rebellion and rise of Chinese emigration.
Arrow incident and beginning of Second Opium War.
Five thousand Chinese residents heed GovernorGeneral Ye Mingchen��s order to leave Hong Kong.
E Sing Bakery poisoning.
Anglo-French forces occupy Canton and capture Governor-General Ye Mingchen.
Chinese residents protest Anglo-French occupation of Canton by leaving Hong Kong in large numbers.
June 1858
July 1858
October 18, 1860
January 1861 1862 1864 1866
1867 1869 Late 1870s-early
1880s August 1882 September 1884
1880
1887 1888
Treaty of Tientsin fails to end Second Opium War.
Twenty thousand Chinese leave Hong Kong. Convention of Peking ends Second Opium War, giving British increased trading and diplomatic rights in China.
British occupy Kowloon in accordance with Convention of Peking.
Founding of the Central School. Establishment of Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
Formation of District Watch Force. Contagious Diseases Ordinance passed. Formation of Tung Wah Hospital Committee.
Mui-tsai controversy.
Po Leung Kuk officially opened.
Dockyard workers protest French aggression in China. Ng Choy becomes first Chinese appointed to
Legislative Council.
Establishment of Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese. Peak Tram opened.
1889
1894 1896
June 1898
Summer 1898
October 1898 April 16, 1899 1901 1904
1905�V1906 1908
1908 1910 October 1911 January 1, 1912 March 11, 1912
Contagious Diseases Ordinance replaced by Women��s and Girl��s Protection Ordinance.
Hong Kong stricken with bubonic plague. Founding of Hong Kong Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
Convention of Peking; New Territories leased to
Britain for ninety-nine years. Chinese reformer Kang Youwei flees to Hong Kong after aborted Hundred Days of Reform.
Residents of Kam Tin resist British occupation of New Territories.
Britain formally occupies New Territories. Revolutionary Yang Quyun assassinated by Qing agents in Hong Kong.
Peak reserved for residence by Europeans. Anti-American Boycott. Anti-Japanese Boycott. British government orders closing of opium
divans in Hong Kong. Completion of Kowloon-Canton Railway. Republican revolution in China. Establishment of Chinese Republic. Official opening of University of Hong Kong.
July 1912
Late 1912-early 1913 1913
1914�V1918 1917-late 1920s 1918
February 1918 1918 1919
1919 May 1919 Spring 1920
January-March
1922 June 1925-October 1926
Assassination attempt on Governor Francis
Henry May. Tram Boycott after colonial government bans use of Chinese currency.
Governor May pushes through Education Bill, requiring all private schools to register with government.
During World War I, Hong Kong provides laborers for Western Front.
Anti-mui-tsai campaign. Peak District Bill prohibits non-Europeans from living on Victoria Peak.
Fire at Happy Valley racetrack kills six hundred
people and wounds four hundred others. Outbreak of cerebrospinal meningitis kills more than one thousand people.
Part of Cheung Chau reserved as vacation reserve for British and American missionaries.
Riots over rice prices. May Fourth Movement in China leads to boycotts in Hong Kong.
Mechanics�� strike.
Seamen��s strike.
General strike-boycott.
May 1926
1931 1936 July 1937
September 1938
July 1941 December 8, 1941 December 25, 1941 January 1942
January 1942
January 1942
Mid-1942 Summer 1944
Chow Shouson becomes first Chinese appointed to Executive Council.
Japanese invasion of Manchuria leads to anti-Japanese riots and hostilities in Hong Kong.
Urban Council established.
Japan launches full-scale invasion of China. Hong Kong becomes haven for refugees and important source of arms and relief for China.
Hong Kong declared neutral zone. Emergency Powers Ordinance reinstated.
Japanese assets in Hong Kong frozen.
Japanese forces invade Hong Kong.
Governor Mark Young surrenders to Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi.
British, American, and Dutch residents arrested.
Japanese authorities announce that anyone without residence or employment must leave Hong Kong.
Japanese authorities attempt to recruit local community leaders through Chinese Representative Council and Chinese Cooperative Council.
Chiang Kai-shek��s Nationalist government approaches Britain to surrender Hong Kong after the war.
Hong Kong Planning Unit formed in Britain to
coordinate postwar recovery.
Spring 1945
August 16, 1945 November 1945 July 1946
August 1946 July 1947 1947�V1949 December 1948
April 1949 June-July 1949
August 1949
October 1, 1949 Colonial Office, Hong Kong Planning Unit, and China Association consider proposals for constitutional change in Hong Kong.
Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt accepts Japanese surrender on behalf of Britain and China.
Government controls on economy lifted.
Residential ordinances for Cheung Chau and the Peak repealed.
Mark Young announces plans for constitutional reform in Hong Kong.
British government approves Young plan ��in principle.��
During Chinese civil war, Shanghai firms move operations to Hong Kong.
British government declares intention to keep Hong Kong.
Amethyst incident.
Local organizations petition Governor Alexander Grantham for constitutional reforms.
With Communist victory imminent on the mainland, the Hong Kong government issues emergency public security legislation. British government reaffirms commitment to keeping Hong Kong.
Establishment of People��s Republic of China (PRC).
December 1949
Late 1949-June 1952
1950�V1953
May 1950 March 1952 September 1952
October 1952
December 24, 1953
April 1955
October 9, 1956
October 1957
Tramway strike.
China National Aviation Corporation and Central Air Transport Incorporation dispute involving China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Britain, and United States.
U.S. and UN embargoes during Korean War threaten Hong Kong��s economy and encourage shift toward industrialization.
Hong Kong government limits immigration from mainland China.
Riots in Kowloon after Canton comfort mission is denied entrance to Hong Kong.
British cabinet plans for constitutional reform in Hong Kong.
Lord Lyttelton tells House of Commons that major constitutional reforms would be inopportune.
Squatter fire in Shek Kip Mei leaves more than fiftyeight thousand people homeless.
Kashmir Princess, airplane transporting PRC officials and foreign journalists, explodes after departing from Kai Tak airport.
Violent confrontation between pro-PRC and proTaiwan supporters leads to riots in Kowloon.
Secret agreement between the United States and Britain: the United States will defend Hong Kong in case of an attack by China.
1963
April 1966
May 1967-fanuary 1968
March 1972
June 1972
November 1972
1974
1975 May 1975 October 1977
March 1979
October 1980 People��s Daily declares that PRC will settle Hong Kong problem when ��the time is ripe.��
Star Ferry riots.
Riots by local leftists lead to violent confrontations between leftists and colonial police force.
Huang Hua, China��s ambassador to UN, declares that Hong Kong��s political status will be resolved by PRC government ��when conditions are ripe.��
Landslides kill more than 250 people.
UN General Assembly removes Hong Kong and Macau from list of colonial territories. Britain subsequently changes Hong Kong��s status from Crown Colony to Dependent Territory.
Establishment of Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).
Vietnamese refugees arrive in large numbers.
Queen Elizabeth II visits Hong Kong.
Several thousand police officers march on police commissioner and ICAC headquarters.
Governor Murray MacLehose visits Beijing to discuss end of 1997 New Territories lease, assured by PRC leader Deng Xiaoping that Hong Kong investors can ��put their hearts at ease.��
MacLehose announces touch base policy whereby illegal immigrants from the mainland March 1981
April 1982
September 1982
June 1983
September 1983
October 1983
January 1984 June 1984 July 1984 will be repatriated.
British Parliament passes British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act, excluding more than 2.5 million Hong Kong Chinese from right of abode in Britain.
Deng Xiaoping informs former British prime minister Edward Heath that Hong Kong people will be allowed to rule after 1997 and that Hong Kong will become a Special Administrative Region.
British prime minister Margaret Thatcher arrives in Beijing to discuss Hong Kong��s post-1997 future with Deng Xiaoping.
Deng Xiaoping declares that PRC will resume sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997.
Stalled Sino-British negotiations lead to drop in value of Hong Kong dollar, subsequently pegged to American dollar.
PRC declares that it will make a unilateral declaration if an agreement on Hong Kong��s reversion to Chinese sovereignty is not reached by September 1984.
Riots by taxi drivers in Mongkok.
PRC government invites senior members of Executive Council to visit Beijing.
Legislation on introduction of indirect elections for Legislative Council in 1985. Hong Kong government publishes consultation green paper, November 1984
December 19, 1984 May 28, 1985 July 1985
September 1985 September 26, 1985 April 1986
October 1986 December 5, 1986
January 1987
April 1987 February 1988
The Further Development of Representative Government in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong government publishes policy white paper, The Further Development of Representative Government in Hong Kong,
announcing that gradual changes to Legislative Council will begin in 1988.
Signing of Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang.
Joint Declaration officially ratified.
Establishment of Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee.
Establishment of Basic Law Consultative Committee.
First indirect elections for Legislative Council.
Hong Kong joins General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
Queen Elizabeth II visits Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong.
Death of Governor Edward Youde in Beijing.
Hong Kong government announces that Kowloon Walled City will be demolished before 1997.
David Wilson arrives as governor.
Hong Kong government publishes policy white paper, The Development of Representative Government: The Way Forward, announcing that
April 1988 July 1988 September 22, 1988 November 1988 February 22, 1989 April 15, 1989
May 20, 1989
May 24, 1989
June 4�V5, 1989
July 11, 1989 direct elections for Legislative Council will be postponed until 1991.
First draft of Basic Law published for public consultation.
Permanent office of Sino-British Joint Liaison Group opened in Hong Kong.
Indirect elections for twenty-six of fifty-seven seats in Legislative Council.
Governor Wilson visits Beijing, meets with Li Peng and other senior PRC officials.
Second draft of Basic Law published for public consultation.
Death of Hu Yaobang leads to prodemocracy demonstrations in Beijing.
After PRC government declares martial law in Bejing, a massive demonstration is held in Hong Kong. Prodemocracy activists form the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China.
Official members of Executive Council and Legislative Council call for half of legislature to be directly elected by 1997.
More than one million people in Hong Kong protest against Tiananmen Square Massacre. Two members of Basic Law Drafting Committee resign in protest.
Jiang Zemin, new general secretary of Chinese Communist Party, warns Hong Kong people not
to interfere in mainland politics.
July 1989
Fall 1989
October 1989
October 31, 1989
December 1989
January 1990
February 1990 March 1990 March 21, 1990 April 1990
The British government rejects calls by Executive Council and Legislative Council for granting right of abode to 3.25 million Hong Kong holders of British passports.
The Hong Kong government refuses to repatriate PRC swimmer Yang Yang, who has sought asylum in Hong Kong.
Governor Wilson announces controversial Port and Airport Development Strategy.
End of second Basic Law draft public-consultation period.
The British government announces that fifty thousand families will be granted full British National passports, with right of abode in Britain. The PRC government insists that it will not recognize these passports.
Governor Wilson visits Beijing and convinces Li Peng of need to increase number of directly elected Legislative Council members in 1991.
British and Chinese officials make secret deal on structure of Legislative Council.
Draft version of Bill of Rights published.
Hong Kong government announces direct elections for Legislative Council in 1991.
Final version of Bill of Rights published.

April 4, 1990 PRC government formally approves Basic Law.
August 1990
September 1990
October 1990
December 1990
January 1991 April 1991
June 8, 1991
June 1991
June 30, 1991
July 4, 1991 September 3, 1991
Hong Kong government insists that airport project does not require approval from British or Chinese governments.
Lord Caithness, British minister for Hong Kong, announces that Hong Kong government must consult PRC government on airport project.
Hong Kong government announces that construction of first stage of airport project will proceed with public funds.
Beginning of application period for British citizenship under British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act.
Governor Wilson discusses airport project with PRC officials in Beijing.
British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd discusses airport project with PRC officials in Beijing.
Hong Kong Bill of Rights enacted. PRC government maintains right to repeal any laws that violate Basic Law.
Governor Wilson discusses airport issue with Prime Minister John Major and other senior officials in London.
Percy Cradock, foreign policy advisor to John Major, issues Memorandum of Understanding on airport project with PRC officials in Beijing.
Governor Wilson announces Sino-British accord on airport project.
John Major signs Memorandum of
Understanding with Li Peng in Beijing.
September 1991
January 1992
May 1992 June 1992
July 9, 1992 July 10, 1992 October 7, 1992
June 1994
August 1994
December 1995 January 1996 September 1996 First direct elections for Legislative Council.
U.S. Congress enacts United States-Hong Kong Policy Act, stipulating that the United States will continue to treat Hong Kong as a separate territory after 1997.
Martin Lee and Yeung Sum of United Democrats discuss political reforms with John Major and Governor-designate Chris Patten in London.
Governor Wilson meets with Li Peng in Beijing.
Governor Patten arrives.
Pro-PRC groups form Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong.
Governor Patten announces proposal for political reform.
With support of Legislative Council, Governor Patten decides to proceed with proposed political reforms.
PRC government closes down Beijing branch of Giordano, owned by Hong Kong entrepreneur and critic Jimmy Lai.
Former Kowloon Walled City, razed in 1994, is officially opened as a classical Chinese garden.
PRC government establishes Hong Kong Preparatory Committee.
Mission to protest Japan��s claims to Diaoyutai (Senkaku) Islands ends disastrously when Hong
Kong activist David Chan is drowned.
December 1996
Midnight, July 1, 1997 July 2, 1997 July 1998
March 1999
May 1999
June 1999
January 2001 July 2001 January 2002
February 2002 Tung Chee-hwa appointed chief executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). Preparatory Committee chooses provisional Legislative Council.
Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty.
Beginning of Asian financial crisis caused by currency devaluation in Thailand.
Opening of new airport at Chek Lap Kok hampered by severe computer errors.
Court of Final Appeal overturns convictions of two men previously found guilty of defacing PRC and HSKAR flags.
March by civil servants against HKSAR government��s plans to privatize certain departments in civil service.
PRC��s National People��s Congress interprets Basic Law, overturning earlier ruling by Court of Final Appeal on right of abode.
Chief Secretary Anson Chan announces that she will resign for ��personal reasons.��
HKSAR government allows Chinese American professor Li Shaomin to return to Hong Kong.
Court of Final Appeal reverses earlier ruling on right of abode.
In an uncontested election, Tung Chee-hwa wins
July 2002 September 2002
March 16, 2003
June 2003
July 1, 2003 July 16, 2003
September 2003
April 6, 2004
April 26, 2004
July 2004 more than 700 of 800 nominations.
50,000 civil servants hold a strike against pay cuts.
HKSAR government releases antisedition bill for public consultation.
World Health Organization declares HKSAR to be infected by SARS; almost three hundred people killed by SARS in next three months.
Signing of Closer Economic Partnership Agreement between Hong Kong and Guangdong.
Some 500,000 people march against government��s proposed security legislation.
Resignations of Security Secretary Regina Ip and Financial Secretary Antony Leung.
After much opposition, HKSAR withdraws controversial proposal for public security legislation.
Standing Committee of National People��s Congress rules that local attempts to modify election laws in Hong Kong require approval from PRC central government.
Standing Committee rules out possibility of popular elections for chief executive in 2007 and for expanded elections for legislature in 2008.
Resignations of two health officials after publication of critical report on government��s handling of SARS contamination.
March 10, 2005
May 2005
June 16, 2005 September 2005 December 4, 2005
December 18, 2005
November 2006
December 2006 Tung Chee-hwa resigns as chief executive of HKSAR; Chief Secretary Donald Tsang becomes acting chief executive.
Court of Final Appeal overturns criminal convictions against eight Falun Gong followers.
Donald Tsang wins uncontested election to complete Tung Chee-hwa��s second term as chief executive.
Hong Kong Disneyland opened.
Former chief secretary Anson Chan participates in large pro-democracy rally.
Riots against World Trade Organization lead to clash between police and protesters led by South Korean farmers.
Former HKSAR health director Margaret Chan elected head of World Health Organization.
Protesters try unsuccessfully to block demolition of the historic Star Ferry clock tower in Central District.


Bibliography and Further Reading
Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: The Culture of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Baker, Hugh D. ��Social Change in Hong Kong: Hong Kong Man in Search of Majority.�� In David Shambaugh, ed., Greater China: 1he Next Superpower, 212�V25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Banham, Tony. Not the Slightest Chance: The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
Bard, Solomon. Traders of Hong Kong: Some Foreign Merchant Houses, 1841�V1899. Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1993.
Benedict, Carol. ��Framing Plague in China��s Past.�� In Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan N. Lipman, and Randall Stross, eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain, 27�V41. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Birch, Alan, and Martin Cole. Captive Years: The Occupation of Hong Kong, 1941�V45. Hong Kong: Heinemann Asia, 1982.
Bird, Isabella L. The Golden Cheronese and the Way Thither. London: John Murray, 1883.
Blyth, Sally, and Ian Wotherspoon. Hong Kong Remembers. Hong Kong: Oxford (University Press, 1996.
Bonavia, David. Hong Kong 1997. Bromley, Kent, UK: Columbus Books, 1985.
Brown, Judith M., and Rosemary Foot, eds. Hong Kong��s Transitions, 1842�V1997. London: Macmillan, 1997.
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Index
Abdoolally Ebrahim
Aberdeen, Lord
Africa
Akers-Jones, David
Americans. See also United States
Amethyst incident
��Anglo-China,��
Anti-American Boycott
Anti-British Struggle Committee
Anti-French strike
Anti-Japanese Boycott
Anti-Mui Tsai Society
Armenians
Arrow incident
Article
Australia; Chinese in; emigration to
Banham, Tony
Bank of China
Bank of East Asia
banking
Basic Law; Article Consultative Committee; drafting of; Drafting Committee; and Hong Kong��s autonomy; and right of abode
Belcher, Edward
Benson, Stella
Bill of Rights
Bird, Isabella
Black, Robert
Blair-Kerr, Alistair
Blake, Henry
Bonham, George
Bowen, George
Bowring, Emily
Bowring, John
Bowring, Lady
Braga, Jose Pedro
Bremer, Gordon
Britain: attitudes toward social welfare; changing power of; and the Cold War; concerns about Hong Kong; emigration to; Hong Kong��s significance, ; loss of empire in East Asia; plans for recovering Hong Kong; reactions to Tiananmen Square Massacre; trade with China; wars with
China; and World War II,
British Army Aid Group
British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act of
British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act of
Butterfield and Swire
Butters, H. R.
Caine, William
Caldecott, Andrew
Caldwell, Daniel
Canada; emigration to
Canto-pop
Canton (Guangzhou); anti-French strike; bubonic plague; comfort mission from; Japanese invasion of; Opium Wars; political instability; republican revolution; and strikes in Hong Kong; trade; uprising
Canton System (Cohong System)
Cater, Jack
Cathay Pacific
Central Air Transport Incorporation
Central School
Cha, Louis
Chadwick, Osbert
Chamberlain, Joseph
Chan, Anson
Chan, David
Chan, Jackie
Chan Lim-pak
Chan, Ming
Chan Lau, Kit-ching
Charles, Prince
Chau Siu Ki
Chau Tsun Nin