Why was the U.K. Still Willing To Give Hong Kong To China Even After Tianamen?

So to twist the OP a bit / shoot a question back:

Is there any way the UK could have used Tienanmen square to maintain HK post '97, and still kept the moral high-ground?
Or rather, what could have China have done pre '97 which would cause the international community to have protested the handing back of HK?

Basically, is there anything that could have gone wrong enough (or right enough, depending on your POV) that the UK would have kept HK, with international recognition?
 
If U.K. was aware about the Tianamen crackdown and that China won't foster democracy of any sort, why would they give away Hong Kong, a democratic island, to a country they know will suppress it? Could they have just done away with the deal? What about Macau?

a few reasons

1) the 99 year lease, while the UK owned Hong Kong Island out right, the Island was so integrated with the New Territories that holding just the Island itself was totally unworkable, and the British government recognized the PRC as the successor to the Qing government it signed the lease with and the rightful government of China, holding HK was largely the reason the Brits recognized the PRC in 1950

2) past breaking the word of the Salisbury Government, in 1984 the British had agreed to the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which both sides had registered it with the UN in 1985, so to break that in 1989 (just 4 years latter) would be breaking the word of the Thatcher's own government

3) people tend to overstate the power of the Chinese military before the modern era, the British were vastly better in the air on the sea, in C&C and tactics, that said, HK is not in a good place to hold, and it would be a major force projection for the UK, HK itself would be destroyed in any fight the outcome would be unsure, and it'd be two nuclear powers at war, maybe just by its weight the number of men they have to throw and are willing to lose the Chinese could win, no matter the out come it'd be ugly and the winner of a real war would win ashes, and if the UK didn't fight it'd be tarred in the eyes of the world as weak

4) racism, till the 11th hour the British didn't set up self government in HK, well into the 1990s there was no Democracy at all in HK, basically the British government isn't willing to spend British blood for the rights of Chinese people in HK.

5) the Chinese agreed that the civil liberties of HK would be agreed to for 50 years, I remember at the time (1997) EVERY one agreed that in 50 years China itself would most likely be a Democracy and so we didn't need to worry at all about HK's future
 
a few reasons

1) the 99 year lease, while the UK owned Hong Kong Island out right, the Island was so integrated with the New Territories that holding just the Island itself was totally unworkable, and the British government recognized the PRC as the successor to the Qing government it signed the lease with and the rightful government of China, holding HK was largely the reason the Brits recognized the PRC in 1950

2) past breaking the word of the Salisbury Government, in 1984 the British had agreed to the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which both sides had registered it with the UN in 1985, so to break that in 1989 (just 4 years latter) would be breaking the word of the Thatcher's own government

3) people tend to overstate the power of the Chinese military before the modern era, the British were vastly better in the air on the sea, in C&C and tactics, that said, HK is not in a good place to hold, and it would be a major force projection for the UK, HK itself would be destroyed in any fight the outcome would be unsure, and it'd be two nuclear powers at war, maybe just by its weight the number of men they have to throw and are willing to lose the Chinese could win, no matter the out come it'd be ugly and the winner of a real war would win ashes, and if the UK didn't fight it'd be tarred in the eyes of the world as weak

4) racism, till the 11th hour the British didn't set up self government in HK, well into the 1990s there was no Democracy at all in HK, basically the British government isn't willing to spend British blood for the rights of Chinese people in HK.

5) the Chinese agreed that the civil liberties of HK would be agreed to for 50 years, I remember at the time (1997) EVERY one agreed that in 50 years China itself would most likely be a Democracy and so we didn't need to worry at all about HK's future

According to the released documents of UK, it's more about China just do not want HK to have democracy.
 
Because it came with a 99 year lease and the legal niceties dictated this? Much the same reason and justification for why the US gave up the Panama Canal Zone. Both countries place great stock in observing (or appearing to observe) contracts they enter into with other countries.
 
Because it came with a 99 year lease and the legal niceties dictated this? Much the same reason and justification for why the US gave up the Panama Canal Zone. Both countries place great stock in observing (or appearing to observe) contracts they enter into with other countries.

the Panama Canal Zone was the US's in perpetuity, like Gitmo, so we could have held onto it forever legally, however the US faced major Panamanian protests in 1962 and then riots in 1964, leading to a slow easing of US controls and restrictions (allowing the Panama flag in the Zone being a biggy) and the negotiations that lead to the Torrijos–Carter Treaties in 1977 that lead to the hand over in 1979, though we jointly controlled the Canal with Panama till 1999
 
4) racism, till the 11th hour the British didn't set up self government in HK, well into the 1990s there was no Democracy at all in HK, basically the British government isn't willing to spend British blood for the rights of Chinese people in HK.

This is a common misconception. Under Patten's governorship the colonial government introduced a series of electoral reforms that, among other things, replaced corporate voting with individual voting, instituted a single-member district system for all three tiers of the administration, lowered the voting age, and more, extending voting privileges to basically all Hong Kongers. It wasn't much, but it was something.

Beijing's response? Dissolve the Legislative Council and form a new one filled with their own cronies, then slander Patten.

The situation is a lot more complicated than one would expect.
 

It's

Banned
It does because this means that during handover neogotiations HK doesn't get to have an elected head of government sitting on it, having one means HK's position would have being correspondingly increased.
Utopian, to say the least.
 
This is a common misconception. Under Patten's governorship the colonial government introduced a series of electoral reforms that, among other things, replaced corporate voting with individual voting, instituted a single-member district system for all three tiers of the administration, lowered the voting age, and more, extending voting privileges to basically all Hong Kongers. It wasn't much, but it was something.

Beijing's response? Dissolve the Legislative Council and form a new one filled with their own cronies, then slander Patten.

The situation is a lot more complicated than one would expect.

as ever you would know far better than I on the details of voting and government

but I would hold that a level of racism when it came to what Britain would risk for HKers is at play, idk what kind of deal the UK would have hammered out if Hong Kong was a majority ethnically British/white area, if hand over would have even been on the table.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Utopian, to say the least.

Why?

International pressure and image matters a whole lot, the red line for China is that it wants HK under Chinese sovereignty, undoing HK democracy when it already has universal suffrage electing a chief executive is a lot harder than implementing fake-universal suffrage when none existed before.
 
Utopian, to say the least.

Utopia just keeps getting broader and broader. I'd hardly call "Chinese people having an elected head of state and effective dominion status within the empire, who then get to negotiate the handover" utopian, because it's entirely feasible and possible.
 
I read that, but the problem is that here China's response to the protests in Tiananmen Square earned them the abject hatred of much of the developed world and stopped their economic development cold. China's growth in the 1980s ITTL completely evaporated, after Tiananmen Square. ITTL Tiananmen Square resulted in demands for Britain to tear up the deal, Britain refused (knowing their position was very weak for the reasons that thread describes), causing full-blown riots in Hong Kong and over a quarter of a million people to flee (with billions of dollars in hand) in a matter of days. Beijing made it worse by stationing an Army in Guangdong, which gave the idea to Hong Kong that China's military force takeover of the colony was imminent, and Thatcher's attempt to sort out the problem resulted in nothing more than her being attacked by words from Beijing and rocks from protesters. As the Hong Kong crisis caused economic problems across Asia, Washington got into it and told China to sort it out with Hong Kong and Britain or else. No invasion came because Beijing wasn't sure whether America would militarily get involved and because by that point they were more interested in salvaging their economic problems. As they figured that point out, Britain rewrote the rules for Hong Kong, reversed the East of Suez policy, built a naval base there and told China that the rules had changed. China swallowed that because by the time the naval base was finished in 1995, they had seen their economy shrink by over 20% in five years and were looking at unrest at home, and were more concerned with fence-mending with the West. This is also way the 99-year lease expired without China making a peep about it - they wanted the growth back, and angering the West wasn't gonna help. Hong Kong decided to make that easier and subsequently poured huge money into southern China to improve things there, with more than a little success. By that point, though, they had lost 400,000+ residents, many of them quite wealthy and most of them to America, Canada, Australia, Singapore and the UK.

This guy justified Hong Kong not returning to China in his TL. Would you agree with him?
 
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This is a common misconception. Under Patten's governorship the colonial government introduced a series of electoral reforms that, among other things, replaced corporate voting with individual voting, instituted a single-member district system for all three tiers of the administration, lowered the voting age, and more, extending voting privileges to basically all Hong Kongers. It wasn't much, but it was something.

Beijing's response? Dissolve the Legislative Council and form a new one filled with their own cronies, then slander Patten.

The situation is a lot more complicated than one would expect.

I think the real tell is the shabby way Britain kept many Hong Kongers in a very vague status about their citizenship. Even today there are Hong Kongers who are British Overseas Nationals but not British citizens.
 
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