The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover

Re:The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover by nthcolumn on Monday June 19, 2017 @06:59PM (#14591056)

This is very different from what I was told by certain exasperated civil servants at the time in Honkers which was that initially China didn't really want change at all as they thought any more of this democracy and capitalism poison (not to mention triad crime) needed to be contained and certainly not brought into China proper and that they would have gladly ignored the expiration of the lease but for the idiocy of the Brits insisting on some sort of replacement framework. They'd have gladly just carried on taking the money pretending it didn't exist. Deng had to come up with a fudge - one country, two systems and Macao followed suit thereafter. But it was a long time ago and that may have just been Lily Wong.

edit: for example the chinese did nothing to stem the tide of people to-ing and fro-ing when HK was still a colony, I recall some squaddies complaining bitterly about having to shoot at them up the hillside whilst People's Army looked on bemused.

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Re:The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Monday June 19, 2017 @07:06PM (#14591082)

I wonder if this is a fault with Western negotiators. Many of the Eastern countries will tolerate a lot as long as it is not publicized and explicit. But, if you try to get them to publicly agree to something where they may lose face, then they will adopt a hard line.

I wonder what issues, Western countries are blundering into currently in that regard.

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Re:The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover by DanielBMarkham on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @07:25AM (#14593645)

That's an interesting point.

To follow-up on it a bit, whenever Western countries are put into a situation like that, they're effectively forced to do exactly what happened here. After all, whether or not something becomes public or not is completely outside of both parties' control. The minute some newspaper-person looked up the terms on the treaty and published it, there would have been an immediate international confrontation. So Britain was forced to come up with some kind of framework whether they wanted to or not -- simply to prevent random crises in the future.

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Re:The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover by elefanten on Monday June 19, 2017 @08:04PM (#14591314)

I wonder what the better source of information is:

1. anecdotes from exasperated civil servants who were not party to the state level discussions,

or 2. declassified documents about the discussions.

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Re:The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover by kalleboo on Monday June 19, 2017 @11:52PM (#14592073)

Do the documents refute his anecdotes though? The documents are only from one side - we don't know what the Chinese side was thinking (and surely they wouldn't tell the British something like that).

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Re:The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover by Hasknewbie on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @04:34AM (#14592967)

Yes they do refute it: while the talks were still secret Chinese officials were mentioning that "China will formally announce their decision to recover HK", i.e. the UK had 2 years to make the handover public, or China would step up, no officious arrangements accepted.

Additionally, TFA notes that China had HK and Macau removed from the "non sovereign territories" UN list years earlier, so that both couldn't aspire to independence.

Considering that HK was lost following the Opium Wars and the first of the "unequal treaties", something that was considered a deeply humiliating episode in China's history, it's not surprising that their government wanted to "right that wrong".

Thatcher was simply delusional about her initial plans ("I really don't understand why they don't want to renew with us this thing they call Unequal Treaty?")

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Re:The secret negotiations behind the Hong Kong handover by mseebach on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @03:17AM (#14592732)

Seeing how China is throwing their weight around and very much testing the limits of international law in the region, it seems rather more prescient than idiotic of Britain to insist on a formal solution, rather than just letting the lease expire and leave a major city hang around in perpetual legal uncertainty.

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