The Hong Kong Handover of 1997
The handover of Hong Kong at midnight on 30 June 1997 was the last act of British decolonisation in Asia and the only one that was, from beginning to end, a negotiated settlement between two sovereign states. The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, by which the British agreed to transfer sovereignty in exchange for a fifty-year guarantee of Hong Kong’s economic and administrative system, was a model of what “agreed decolonisation” looks like on paper. On the ground, in 2014 and 2019, it was the model of what such agreements cannot do. The argument of this article is that the handover was a political triumph for the British government of the moment and a moral failure for everyone involved. The treaty worked; the people it was supposed to protect were the people it failed.
The Origins of the Hong Kong Question
Hong Kong was a British possession by three different legal instruments. Hong Kong Island was ceded in perpetuity by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the consequence of British victory in the First Opium War. Kowloon was ceded by the Convention of Peking in 1860, the consequence of the Second Opium War. The New Territories, the larger area north of Kowloon, were leased in 1898 for 99 years. The lease would expire on 1 July 1997, and with it would expire perhaps two-thirds of the colony’s land area, most of its water supply, and the bulk of its food supply. There was no question, in the 1980s, of British Hong Kong surviving without the New Territories.
The British administration in the post-war period was, by the standards of late colonial governance, an impressive institution. The colonial service was small — perhaps 1,500 British officials in a population of 5.7 million at the time of the handover — and the government worked through a system of appointed and elected local elites that had been built up since the 1950s. The economic transformation of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, under the governorship of Murray MacLehose (1971–1982), turned Hong Kong from a manufacturing entrepôt into a financial centre, and the per capita income of Hong Kong at the time of the handover was higher than that of Britain. The colony was, as Chris Patten put it in East and West (1998), “the most successful place on earth,” and the British success in Hong Kong was the most substantial argument for the British imperial model that the late twentieth century produced.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration
The Joint Declaration was negotiated over two years, from 1982 to 1984, by the British foreign secretary (and former prime minister) Geoffrey Howe, and the Chinese foreign minister Wu Xueqian. The negotiations were difficult, and the British, as Patten has acknowledged, were negotiating from weakness: the lease was going to expire, and the British could not have held Hong Kong by force against Chinese opposition. The declaration provided for the transfer of sovereignty on 1 July 1997, for the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), and for the maintenance of the economic and administrative system for fifty years.
The most controversial question was democratic reform. The Joint Declaration was ambiguous on the question, providing for a high degree of autonomy but reserving the final say on constitutional development to Beijing. The British interpretation, advanced by Patten during his governorship (1992–1997), was that the declaration provided for a substantial measure of democratic reform. The Chinese interpretation, advanced by Jiang Zemin and the post-1997 Beijing government, was that the declaration provided for autonomy, not democracy, and that the pace of reform was a matter for the Chinese central government. The 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement were the consequences of the disagreement. Steve Tsang’s A Modern History of Hong Kong (2007) is the most thorough account of the negotiation; the political scientist Michael DeGolyer’s documentation of the constitutional disputes is the most detailed evidence.
The Handover Ceremony
The ceremony, at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre on the night of 30 June 1997, was the most choreographed piece of political theatre that the late twentieth century produced. Tony Blair, the new British prime minister, attended. The Prince of Wales, who was to become Charles III, read the queen’s farewell. The Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng attended. The Union Jack was lowered; the Chinese flag was raised; the rain, mercifully, held off for the most part. Chris Patten’s account in East and West, of the moment when the British delegation stood in the rain and watched the ceremony through the windows of the building they had just left, is the most poignant.
The handover was, in its own terms, a major political event. The British government was completing a long process of decolonisation that had begun with the independence of India in 1947. The Chinese government was completing the recovery of a major piece of “national territory” that had been lost in the Opium Wars, and the recovery was the most consequential reversal of the nineteenth-century imperial order in East Asia. The ceremony was attended by 4,000 guests, watched by perhaps a billion television viewers, and was the occasion for the elaborate performance of the one-China principle that has, ever since, been the central political fact of post-handover Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Economy After 1997
The economy of Hong Kong, by the standards of the immediate post-handover years, was a success. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, which began three weeks after the handover, was met with an aggressive intervention by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and the territory’s stock market and currency recovered within a year. The SARS epidemic of 2003, which killed perhaps 300 people in Hong Kong, was the worst public health crisis in the territory’s history, and the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) signed with Beijing later that year was the beginning of the economic integration of Hong Kong with the Pearl River Delta. The Hong Kong economy continued to grow, and the territory’s role as the financial centre of East Asia was maintained.
The longer-run economic picture is more mixed. The integration with the Pearl River Delta, which began as a benefit, became a constraint. The opening of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone in 2013, and the increasing competitiveness of Shenzhen, eroded Hong Kong’s position as the principal financial centre of China, and the political turmoil of 2014 and 2019 produced a substantial brain drain. The British National (Overseas) passport scheme, extended in 2021, has produced a substantial migration of Hong Kong residents to the United Kingdom, and the economic effect on Hong Kong is now a matter of substantial concern. Steve Tsang and his co-author in the recent The Hong Kong Story (2020) treat the economic question as inseparable from the political.
The Handover and the Hong Kong Political System
The Joint Declaration’s commitment to a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong has been, since 2020, an open question. The National Security Law imposed by Beijing in June 2020, in the wake of the 2019 protests, was a fundamental assertion of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong. The 2021 changes to the electoral system, requiring “patriots” to administer Hong Kong, and the prosecution of the principal figures of the 2019 protests under the National Security Law, have produced the most substantial alteration of the post-handover political system since 1997. The 2019 protests, in which perhaps a million people marched in June 2019, were the most substantial political demonstrations in the territory’s history, and the response to them was the most substantial assertion of Chinese sovereignty.
The British government’s response was inadequate. The 2021 extension of the BN(O) passport scheme was the most substantial British action, but the action was taken more than two decades after the handover, and the response was, as Patten and others have argued, too little and too late. The 2020 suspension of the extradition treaty with Hong Kong, the 2021 sanctions on Chinese officials, and the public statements of successive British foreign ministers have been the substance of the British response, and the substance has not, on any assessment, been adequate to the scale of the change.
The Handover and the British Empire
The handover of Hong Kong was the end of the British Empire in Asia but not the end of the British presence in its former colonial possessions. The British Overseas Territories — fourteen of them, ranging from Bermuda and Gibraltar to the Falkland Islands and Pitcairn — are the surviving remnants of the empire, and they are governed, in most cases, under the Westminster model. The territories have been a recurring source of political difficulty, from the Falklands War of 1982 to the Gibraltar sovereignty question with Spain, and the question of their future — integration with the United Kingdom, independence, or the retention of the current constitutional arrangement — has been a major element of post-imperial British politics.
The handover, in the longer view, was the moment when the British Empire stopped being a political fact and became a historical fact. The British, by the time of the handover, had been preparing for this transition for fifty years, and the 1997 ceremony was the most graceful performance of the transition. The performance, however, concealed a harder truth: that the Joint Declaration’s commitment to the Hong Kong way of life was a commitment that the British could not enforce, and that the Chinese government, from the moment of the handover, was not prepared to honour in the way that the Hong Kong people had been led to expect.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the Hong Kong handover has been substantially revised since 2019. The older tradition, of which Jan Morris’s Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire (1993) and Steve Tsang’s earlier work is representative, treated the handover as a model of “agreed decolonisation” and the Joint Declaration as a model treaty. The more recent scholarship, of which Patten’s East and West (1998), the work of the political scientist Michael DeGolyer, and the more recent writing of Steve Tsang is the most distinguished representative, has produced a more cautious picture. The handover, on this more recent view, was a political settlement that worked in the economic sphere and failed in the political sphere, and the failure was, in significant part, the consequence of the British decision in 1984 to accept an ambiguous treaty rather than to insist on a clear one. The current debate is over the question of British responsibility: how much of the post-2019 deterioration is the consequence of the Joint Declaration’s ambiguity, how much of the British government’s failure to act on its own commitments, and how much of the fundamental incompatibility of the British and Chinese interpretations of sovereignty. The most recent generation of historians, of whom the work of the journalist Gwynne Dyer and the academic Lawson Lam are the most distinguished representatives, has treated the post-2019 situation as a vindication of the most pessimistic reading of the Joint Declaration.