During the Patten era, Hong Kong became positively infested by the British. This was partly because flights were cheap and it was the last chance to see the last decent chunk of The Empire and partly because, with Hong Kong's GDP per head now larger than Britain's the British were cheap labour for jobs where command of Cantonese was not a requirement.

At the same time, Deng's "Southern Tour" triggered investment in Guangdong, and the economies of Hong Kong, with six million people, and Guangdong, with ninety million, became intertwined.

I think that at this point I should put in a link to the Wikipedia page on the Basic Law, in case anyone wants to follow the "democracy" saga in more detail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Basic_Law

To sum it up briefly; during the Sino-British negotiations there was a baby elephant in the room, and the elephant has been in the room ever since, growing and growing. The elephant is called Democracy.

The torrents of abuse from Beijing that greeted the PADS scheme, which took, as these things do, some time to get going very visibly, but which started with the arrival in Hong Kong of squads of (usually) British and (occasionally) Japanese civil engineers and architects and the mobilisation to Hong Kong of seventy per cent of the world's dredger fleet, was as nothing compared to what happened next.

The Hong Kong economy fell off a cliff, overnight. Emigration to Canada, Singapore, wherever, increased massively.

The British decided that they had to do something to restore business confidence in Hong Kong.

I was not in, or anywhere near, the room at the time and I have no idea why it happened, but the Hong Kong Government decided to pull off the shelf a project that had been languishing in a forgotten corner.