I pushed back against imperialism dressed up as liberation. Everybody's soooo concerned about Hong Kong civil rights, just like they were about Iraqi civil rights.
Other places, where it's not to our geopolitical advantage? Crickets.
Bringing up "British rule was no panacea" when we're talking about the CCP's efforts to deliberalize a de facto free society reads like you're apologizing for what the CCP wants to do.
Funny how Britain was happy to rule over Hong Kong for centuries without introducing democratic reform and then suddenly 'liberalised' things only when they were on the point of handing HK back to China. Almost as if it was done with precisely the intent of leaving the Chinese with as much of a hot potato as possible.
They don't call it "Perfidious Albion" for nothing!
Britain first raised its flag over Hong Kong island in 1842. The New Territories, without which Hong Kong is not a viable independent entity, were leased to Britain under a 99-year lease in 1898.
This was a consequence of one of the worst aspects of colonial Britain, the Opium wars, but, as hker points out [1], since the 1960s Britain has attempted to democratize Hong Kong, but was constrained by China's realistic threat of invasion.
There's not much credit to any side here, but let's at least get the history right.
I'm not saying you're wrong but China in the 1960s was an unindustrialised, agrarian 3rd-world country which was barely able to feed its own people. I suspect Britain [a rich, industrialised, nuclear-armed member of NATO] would have laughed in their face, if China had issued any threats.
We shouldn't fall into the trap of looking at the might & modernity of China today and thinking t'was ever thus. I'm old enough to remember when news footage from China would show countless thousands of people, clad in denim boiler suits, riding bicycles through Peking, with nary a car to be seen.
[ASIDE: Ironic that moving towards vehicle-free cities with a cycling populace is now seen as aspirational and a sign of progress whereas, back then, it was an indicator of how backward China was]
Furthermore, remember that it was China's intervention in Korea in the early 1950s that almost overran the US forces in Korea, and forced a negotiated settlement with the creation of two Koreas.
NATO is irrelevant, as that was an alliance for the defence of Western Europe, not small remnants of Britain's colonies. NATO was not about to go to war with China then, any more than it involved itself in Korea.
And what would Britain do with its nukes? Nothing more than the US did in Korea and Viet Nam. If Britain were to even threaten their use, it would seriously damage its relationship with the USA, by creating a precedent that the USSR (and, by 1964, a nuclear China) could invoke at any time. Remember what happened over Suez, which did not even go as far as a nuclear threat.
Even if Britain halted an initial invasion, China would still be there, on the border of Hong Kong, for as long as the British could afford to stay (or until 1997, if it came to that, which it would not.)
None of this analysis is dependent on "looking at the might & modernity of China today and thinking t'was ever thus."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_independence#Colonia...
In the 60s/70s China was in bad terms with Soviet, US/UK saw the benefit of having China as "Allies". Thus, HK kind of became the scapegoat.
If we're so much better, maybe we can let up on the propaganda and whitewashing of history?
(Edited to specify that the end result was liberal, not the whole thing)