This is what Britain should have done back in 97. Instead, they spent the time trying to stop Portugal from offering citizenship to the people of Macau so that Hongkongers wouldn’t try to ask for it.
(1) Made recognition of PRC conditional on PRC agreeing to an indefinite extension of lease on New Territories, such that no handover of HK was required
(2) Threaten that, if PRC didn't agree, UK would return New Territories to ROC instead, with British troops deployed to defend it
(3) Make clear to PRC that any military action against UK-controlled (or ROC-controlled) HK would result in a war between two nuclear weapon states (UK vs PRC)
(4) Give HK real democracy back in the 50s/60s/70s/80s, rather than waiting until 5 years before handover
(5) Build nuclear-powered desalination plants to remove HK dependency on mainland water
China’s army bigger, China’s army bigger, China’s army bigger.
The only hope in hell for Britain would have been in Clinton. Given American optimism at the time, that would have been fruitless.
UK has nukes. PRC has nukes. Did PRC want a shooting war with another nuclear power?
> The only hope in hell for Britain would have been in Clinton. Given American optimism at the time, that would have been fruitless.
You are talking about the 1990s. If you read my original comment, I was talking about the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. If at the height of the Cold War, Communist China had attacked a British colony, how would America have responded?
Probably with fascinated interest. America was pressuring the UK to decolonise, and had been since 41. HK was not as strategically significant as Berlin or Korea, besides Korea had both China and the USSR supporting the invasion.
I visualise something nearer Suez than Korea 2.
HK independence in the 50s would have been difficult as most of the land area - 100x smaller than Taiwan - was leased. Not sure how ignoring that lease would play out internationally, but I suspect more provocation to CCP China than solution. HK island is just a few square miles, the rest - the leased portion - is part of the Chinese mainland. Taiwan is a few tens of thousands of square km of defensible island.
Giving to ROC? I heavily suspect had that been an option at the time the US would have damn near insisted on picking it up, just as had happened with a number of the tiny naval and air bases. So it would probably have stayed as British territory, leased to the US.
Actually passing to ROC would have to wait until after Chiang Kai Shek achieved some measure of stability. The US spent much of the 50s expecting Taiwan and Chiang Kai Shek to fall. By the 60s HK is developing in its own right, but Eisenhower had started to support Taiwan militarily. Now it's getting trickier.
Not back in the mid 80s, when the agreements were struck.
UK is too far.
UK's war claim on basically Chinese soil is laughable.
>UK is too far.
The UK whacked Argentina pretty good.
While obviously China would have been able to put up a much better fight the UK can project force on the other side of the world if they need to.
Not really due to fear of military invasion, but due to fear of economic fallout on UK and giving up some luxury for its own citizens for a right cause. Lavish lifestyle funded by colony's money is more important for UK than fight for the rights of the people of its colonies.
They have milked every one of their colonies resources until the very last minute they left. Also before leaving they always sow seeds of division and failure. That's what they did for Hong Kong too.
So saying they wanted to give democracy to HK is outlandish.
The PRC fought the combined UN forces to a standstill in the Korean war in the 1950s, and the British empire had already fallen apart and was in no shape to fight China then in the context of the cold war.
It's the same old story of old British empire in every colony, where they will promise but never keep it. They were just hypocrite, the main intention was always that colony should not prosper or challenge British empire in future, after they leave.
Your dislike of the UK seems to be blinding you to historical facts? Or do you have sources that prove these statements incorrect? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_development_in_Ho...
“Records declassified in 2014 show discussions about self-government between British and Hong Kong governments resumed in 1958, prompted by the British expulsion from India and growing anti-colonial sentiment in the remaining Crown Colonies. Zhou Enlai, representing the Communist Party of China at the time, warned, however, that this "conspiracy" of self-governance would be a "very unfriendly act" and that the Communist Party wished the present colonial status of Hong Kong to continue. China was facing increasing isolation in a Cold War world and the party needed Hong Kong for contacts and trade with the outside world.[19][20][21]
1960s Edit China's leaders explicitly wanted to "preserve the colonial status of Hong Kong".[21] Liao Chengzhi, a senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong affairs, said in 1960 that China "shall not hesitate to take positive action to have Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories liberated" should the status quo (i.e. colonial administration) be changed. The warning killed any democratic development for the next three decades.[22]“
We'd just had the Korean War, Britain alone wouldn't have won a rerun, the West might. Support for doing it again, without hostility from the other side first is just about unthinkable. Britain might have been able to achieve better terms on Kowloon and New Territories a hundred years previously during Pax Britannica, but those territories were only there as uninhabited military buffer zone for the transhipment port, naval base and coaling station. So when Britain could, no one thought it important, there was no one there.
Development and them mattering came much, much later. Only really after the Chinese revolution started to provide an endless stream of well educated workers and families with a dislike of Communism. Now the UK started moves to democratise - there was getting to be a population that cared, and which fit with the policy of majority rule before independence, in the post war decolonisation era.
And the UK gave in to PRC's threats. Was PRC really willing to start a war with the UK? Or were they bluffing, and the UK fell for PRC's bluff? Or maybe, the UK was never really that keen on HK democracy, and PRC's threats were just a convenient excuse to avoid doing something they weren't very keen on doing anyway?
> We'd just had the Korean War, Britain alone wouldn't have won a rerun, the West might
The Korean War is not exactly comparable. Neither North Korea nor South Korea were nuclear armed states (during the 1950s), although they both had nuclear powers as allies. A war between UK and PRC in the 1960s would have been a shooting war between two nuclear powers. Would the PRC really had been willing to risk such a thing? Especially given the state that PRC itself was in (millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward, followed by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, its isolation the Sino-Soviet split, an economy vastly weaker than it has today, etc.)
Err, there were 5x more Chinese troops in the Korean War than North Korean, and Soviets flying air cover. It would be directly comparable, if there were a Communist invasion, except I really doubt there'd have been support from the Western Allies without that invasion first. Even then I'm not sure - there were repeated concerns Korea could have escalated into WW3.
A HK airlift would be logistically challenging to say the least, and I don't believe it would have had similar chance of being successful. Look at Kai Tak, and its famously awkward mountain avoiding approach back in the 1950s. Berlin was universally acknowledged as strategically important in the newly hatched Cold War. The East and West had been nose to nose militarily in Germany since 45. Berlin was served by multiple source airfields, several air corridors and flying boats onto the lakes. HK would probably have had to be entirely sourced from Taiwan.
Yet Berlin succeeded as much from the counter blockade, that actually turned out to be surprisingly damaging to the East, as the huge scale of the sustained air lift. I can't picture a HK airlift around the same era as being nearly as successful.
I just don't see it playing out OP's way at all. Events would rapidly turn it to something very different and dangerous.
In wondering how, I end up with only lots of unanswerable questions. Cut half our presence in Germany so soon after the Airlift? Cut the naval and air shadowing of Moscow? Move a couple of carrier groups to HK? What;s the USSR going to do in response in Europe? How to work the nuclear threat? Polaris didn't arrive until the end of the 60s. So move all our 50s nuclear deterrent, which was only ready mid to late 50s, to Malaya with then Communist inclined rebels maybe? I think Victors, Vulcans and Canberras needed more runway than Kai Tak then had. They weren't carrier capable. So where you going to put them? Taiwan? Except Taiwan was predicted at risk of falling through the 50s, which is why US military support didn't come until the end of the decade. Besides, that starts to look like the West mobilising for WW3. A robust response becomes more and more likely.
OK I can't make this novel's plot work. :)