Now stop it Brian, this level of flattery and complimenting is too much for a humble Brit to take. I do however do my best, and your recognition is much valued.
slavery at the hands of the Peking pack of predators
And just what would be the point of a life where you can't sell a few million people down the river every now and then?
But seriously, I expect you know that most of Hong Kong was under a 100 year lease due to expire 1997. I suppose it wasn't great foresight to put so much effort into developing a colony on such shaky foundations.Maybe the negotiators of 1897 thought a renewal would be possible in a hundered years' time, expecting Britain to still be as strong, and China to still be as weak, as it was in the late nineteenth century.
Who knows, perhaps if it hadn't been for the two WW's with their consequential bankrupting of the nation, not to mention the mass slaughter of so many men in their teens & 20's of WW1, Britain may have retained most of the wealth & global influence it had in those days..., although I think the rise of national identites around the world made the end of a formal "Empire" inevitable
Perhaps circumstances came along which Britain couldn't halt and were destined to see its decline and the rise of another...
As for the next power whose time may be up? This may be another case of a nation ineviatably having to expend its status and wealth on a great cause, one it can't escape if it wanted to.The question, the concern, is what rising international power will that great nation be able to turn to?
regards ;-)
Interestingly enough, the other night I listened to an overnight re-broadcast of Hong Kong's radio programmes here in Auckland, and an optspoken talk show host, Tao Kit, poked fun at Deng Xiaoping for his irrationality in deanding HK to be returned to the PRC. He also poked fun at Tung Chee-hwa and other main post-1997 officials that they didn't realise the colonial administration had masterfully put all the "mines" around key HK government posts and all of them got caught post-handover wise (property speculations, 'first-language' education, R&D development, etc). There was also a joke that why Deng Xiaoping insisted HK to be returned on 1 July 1997: by doing so they had contradicted themselves in declaring the 1898 treaty leasing the New Territories to be valid.
Seriously speaking, Hong Kong would have returned to China much earlier if the Republic of China completely disappeared in 1949 or if Chiang Kai-shek succeeded in regaining the mainland in 1960. In general, HK Chinese don't particularly like the British, but they don't hate them either. Most people wanted HK to stay British in the 1980s because the alternative, Communist PRC, looked far worse. If, in 1983-1984, the regime representing China in negotiation is a democratic one, HK people would have welcomed China in droves.