Abstract
Hong Kong’s present-day economic strengths and political importance have obscured the fact that for much of its history the utility of the Crown Colony lay not in its own economy, but in the functions it performed for the wider British presence in China. Hong Kong’s transition has been placed firmly in the context of that much broader transition, British decolonisation, but the end of British rule in Hong Kong is also in fact the last act in the local drama of the British presence in China. While British diplomats and commentators have lost sight of the fuller picture of Britain’s history in China, their counterparts in the PRC, and the elderly leaders still setting policies today, are only too aware of it.1 British negotiators were taken by surprise in 1982 by the strength of Chinese feelings. Clearly, a little history might have helped.
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Notes
Michael Yahuda, Hong Kong: China’s Challenge (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 22.
For a more refined assessment of these debates in this context, see Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis’, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 290–314.
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see also Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), pp. 78–88.
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Thomas G. Rawski, ‘Chinese Dominance of Treaty Port Commerce and its Implications, 1860–1875’, Explorations in Economic History, 7, 4 (1970), pp. 451–73. See also Hao, The Commercial Revolution.
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Bickers, R.A. (1997). The Colony’s Shifting Position in the British Informal Empire in China. In: Brown, J.M., Foot, R. (eds) Hong Kong’s Transitions, 1842–1997. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25499-6_3
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