The U.S. Should Defend Hong Kong

Some critics speculated that one way out for Hong Kong is for her to be integrated into Taiwan, and then get transitive protection by the United States.

The handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997 in based on the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which China declares is merely historical and no longer holds any “practical significance.” [1]

Note that Hong Kong was given to the Britain by three treaties in the 19th century (1842 Treaty of Nanking, 1860 Convention of Peking, 1898 The Second Convention of Peking), and the true copies of all treaties are in the hand of Taiwan, which were brought to Taiwan by the KMT government during its retreat to Taiwan before 1950.

So if the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the declaration behind the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, is revoked (partly because CCP declares it invalid), Britain might declare that Hong Kong should return to the holder of the three treaties–Taiwan.

Extremely unlikely, but arguably has legal justification.

As a side note, Hong Kong and Taiwan are the two main places sharing the use of traditional Chinese characters (besides Macau), and Taiwan has a good track record of respecting sub-languages of spoken Chinese (not just use Mandarin), so culturally they share a lot. And they also value democracy, freedom, and rule of law as core values, so ignoring geopolitics their integration is plausible.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/br...