Hong Kong: a One‐Way Ticket to an Unknown Destination

Abstract

THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF THE HONG KONG PROBLEM ARE WELL known and can be briefly stated. Britain acquired the colony of Hong Kong Island as a port of access to the China trade under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking which concluded the Opium War. Followin the Second Anglo-Chinese War a further 3¾ square miles of land, British Kowloon and Stonecutters Island, were ceded to Britain. But under the 1898 convention of Peking a much larger area, formerly part of Guangdong province and now known as the New Territories, amounting to over 360 square miles and including numerous small islands and the surrounding seas, was leased to Britain for 99 years. This lease runs out in July 1997. The Chinese Communist government in Peking has repeatedly declared its intention to reassert its sovereign right to control the whole territory of Hong Kong by 1997 ‘at the latest’. Indeed the People's Republic's leaders have made it clear that they have never accepted the treaties through which land was ceded and leased to Britain as being valid under international law. They regard them as part of the long series of ‘Unequal treaties’ imposed by the imperial owers which the rulers of China in that period were compellecf to accept because of military weakness. Thus there is no question of China being ready to renew the New Territories lease or to come to some agreement recognizing British sovereignty over Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Peking has never, since 1949, formally accepted the legality of British status in Hong Kong.