mr friendly guy wrote:Didn't Britain give up Hong Kong because its lease had expired? In which case there wasn't much legality to hold onto it, unless you start getting into funny business and arguing that the modern day PRC isn't the successor state to the Qing who signed the original lease to the British. Thankfully the Brits didn't try that line and negotiated a deal with the Chinese leadership.
Part of the territory was under a 99-year lease from China, and that lease had expired. The rest of it, the British took from China in the Opium Wars, and those treaties were supposed to be permanent. But the PRC never recognized such treaties, and the British realized it would be totally impractical to govern Hong Kong if they did hand back the leased territory and not the 'permanent' land. So they handed back the whole thing.
You can make a damn good "decolonization" argument for handing over 'permanent' territory seized in something like the Opium Wars though, so I'm on board with that part.
mr friendly guy wrote:Didn't Britain give up Hong Kong because its lease had expired? In which case there wasn't much legality to hold onto it, unless you start getting into funny business and arguing that the modern day PRC isn't the successor state to the Qing who signed the original lease to the British. Thankfully the Brits didn't try that line and negotiated a deal with the Chinese leadership.
The lease only applied to the New Territories - AFAIK we would have been completely within our rights to hang on to HK Island itself. Instead we agreed to hand over the whole place to China, presumably on the grounds that it would have been a net drain to try and sustain the reduced territory, but I'm not 100% certain on that point.
China holding onto the New Territories would have allowed them to pretty much have the rest of Hong Kong by the balls, given that most of the power plants and reservoirs are in the NT.
I wonder what would have happened if Thatcher had tried to hold onto the New Territories, treaties be damned.
Turns out that a five way cross over between It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Ali G Show, Fargo, Idiocracy and Veep is a lot less funny when you're actually living in it.
I would imagine the Chinese army would walk in and Britain would be able to do precisely jack all.
Marcus Aurelius: ...the Swedish S-tank; the exception is made mostly because the Swedes insisted really hard that it is a tank rather than a tank destroyer or assault gun Ilya Muromets: And now I have this image of a massive, stern-looking Swede staring down a bunch of military nerds. "It's a tank." "Uh, yes Sir. Please don't hurt us."
