MY SAY: WHY DID GREAT BRITAIN ABANDON HONG KONG?
The treaty of Nanking in 1842 ceded Hong Kong to the British at the end of the Opium War. It was given to them in perpetuity but in 1898 the British pledged to give Hong Kong back in 1997 signing a 99 year lease.
In 1984 Prime Minister Thatcher’s reluctance to return Hong Kong- a bustling, successful mercantile nation with an extremely popular British governor named Christ Patten- was overcome by Deng Xiaoping’s promises of retaining Hong Kong’s autonomy.
Was it naivete or duplicity? Only a few years later in 1989 the massacre of Tiananmen occurred but did not temper the zeal to appease China by ceding Hong Kong.
When the withdrawal was implemented on June 30th, 1997 Great Britain further betrayed its former colony, by refusing entry permits to citizens of Hong Kong, rendering them prisoners to mainland China’s tyranny. The citizens of Hong Kong were rightly outraged.
And as soon as Patten left, he was vilified by Beijing as a “Whore of a thousand years.”
The rest as we see now is the legacy of western appeasement of Communist China.
Taiwan beware! rsk
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