25 years ago, this Sheet highlighted, at the top of the front page, the news: “Hong Kong has returned to control of China (…) after 156 years of British rule. The territory, which will be able to maintain the capitalist system and administrative autonomy for 50 years, received 4,000 military”.
The event marked the end of the British Empire, in the opinion of historians of the period, in addition to the most significant liberation from colonialism for China, after successive wars against Western powers and losses of territory that defined Beijing’s policy from then on.
The promise of autonomy for 50 years, signed in a treaty by China and the United Kingdom, however, was not fulfilled, and before the devolution completed 25 years, the communist regime had already suffocated groups and political dissidents who were protesting for democracy in the city.
The truth, however, is that Hong Kong was never a democracy in practice, neither today nor in the times of British domination, when the rulers were chosen by the monarch of the United Kingdom, and not elected by the local population – in this period, however, the residents enjoyed a certain freedom of speech and press, which has been suppressed under Chinese rule.
The history of Hong Kong in general goes back to the beginning of the 19th century, when the British started to use the region as a port for ships that unloaded opium in the country – before that, the area was occupied by fishing communities.
China and the United Kingdom went to war after Beijing tried to curb the country’s opium trade, a drug that generated a legion of addicts. With the British victory in the First Opium War in 1842, which marked the beginning of the so-called “century of humiliation” for the Chinese, the two countries signed the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded sovereignty over the region to the United Kingdom.
Later agreements, considered unfair by the Chinese, expanded British rule over dozens of islands, until in 1898 the two governments agreed that the occupation would only be valid for 99 years and that afterwards the land would be returned to China, which in fact occurred in 1997.
The period, however, was turbulent, and British colonialism never ceased to be questioned. Between 1925 and 1926, for example, a general strike was called against racism on the part of the settlers, after troops of Indian Sikhs, in the service of the British, opened fire on Chinese protesters in Shanghai.
In 1966, a series of protests that began against rising ferry fares and soon turned against the empire brought crowds to the streets of Hong Kong. A year later, in 1967, more than 30 demonstrations, initially called for better working conditions, left more than 50 dead and 800 injured, in addition to almost 5,000 prisoners and 2,000 condemned.
In the meantime, another event embittered the city’s undemocratic history. In 1941, during World War II and in the midst of the invasion of China, which had begun a few years earlier, Japan drove the British away and took control of Hong Kong for nearly four years, until 1945, when it was defeated in the war.
Historians estimate that 10,000 women were raped in the first days of Japanese rule in the city alone. Between 1941 and 1945, Hong Kong’s population dropped from 1.6 million to 600,000 people, according to scholars of the period.
With the defeat of the Japanese, Hong Kong returned to being a British colony. This term, however, has been questioned by the communist regime in Beijing and will be out of textbooks in Hong Kong in the academic year that begins next August, according to local media.
The new history books bring another version: that the city was never a colony of the United Kingdom, but a territory occupied by an invading nation – which disregards the territorial cession treaties signed by the Chinese empire.
“The British aggression violated the principles of international law, so their occupation of the Hong Kong region should not have been recognized as legal,” reads an excerpt from a book for teachers seen by The New York Times.
Colony or not, the fact is that it was only in 1985 that China and the United Kingdom reached an agreement to return the territory to Beijing, 12 years later, when it gained the status of a special administrative region and the promise that the region would have its autonomy respected until 2047. —which, once again, has not been granted to Hong Kong residents.
