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.