The Recovery of Hong Kong } 579
PRC-British interactions over the reversion of Hong Kong began in the
late 1970s. The story of reversion nonetheless belongs properly in the post-
6-4 period of China’s foreign relations, because the upheavals of 1989–1991
profoundly altered both Beijing’s perception of the Western subversive threat
and, consequently, Chinese handling of Hong Kong’s reversion. After the
Beijing Massacre, China’s leaders perceived British policy toward Hong Kong
as another element in the Western effort to destabilize the PRC, and dug in
their heels to resist perceived British plots. The collapse in late 1993 of Sino-
British cooperation over Hong Kong’s reversion and subsequent nondemo-
cratic evolution of postreversion Hong Kong must be seen in the context of
China’s post-6-4 struggle to ensure regime survival.
From 1842 to 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony. In the Chinese view,
Britain’s seizure of Hong Kong was part of China’s Century of National
Humiliation. One provision of the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 that ended the
First Opium War was the cession in perpetuity of the island of Hong Kong on
the east side of the Pearl River estuary, eighty-five miles downstream from
Guangzhou. Across the estuary to the west was the Portuguese enclave of
Macao, granted by China’s Ming Dynasty government in 1557.^2 Both enclaves,
Hong Kong and Macao, gave European businessmen a base of operation
beyond Chinese control but close enough to China’s markets to offer conve-
nient links. As China was forced to open ever more widely to foreign trade in
the second half of the nineteenth century, Hong Kong waxed as an entrepôt
for trade with south China.
A second Opium War between Qing China and Britain and France in
1856–1860 culminated in a punitive Anglo-French expedition to Beijing to
punish China for various violations of diplomatic protocol. Among those
punishments was the sacking of the beautiful Yuanming Yuan gardens, an
imperial pleasure palace filled with exquisite architecture and gardens, in
northwest Beijing. The Convention of 1860 that ended the Second Opium
war ceded, again in perpetuity, the Kowloon peninsula opposite Hong Kong
Island. Hong Kong Island is very mountainous—basically several steep
mountains protruding from the sea—with little level ground for warehouses
or other commercial facilities. Kowloon peninsula provided much more
flat ground for commercial operations. The northern boundary of Kowloon
peninsula is still demarcated by Boundary Street, running east-west atop
Kowloon. In the Chinese historical memory—fed constantly by state patri-
otic indoctrination—the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties forced on China
at gunpoint to end those wars, and the cession of Hong Kong Island and
Kowloon peninsula are all remembered as bitter events.
A third agreement between China and Britain, in July 1898, leased to
Britain for a period of ninety-nine years a swath of territory, called the New
Territories, north of Kowloon peninsula to provide Hong Kong with greater
defensive depth and a more secure supply of food and water. At that time, the