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Summing up

Submitted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 11:06

Was Hong Kong, as a colony, a success?

"Was the French Revolution a success?"

"It is too early to tell."

Zhou Enlai, speaking 150 years after the event.

I think this question could be asked in different ways:

A success in terms of the original idea – a British trading post in China?

The Empire, long divided, must unite. History comes to a .

Submitted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 09:03
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.

Fat Pang, part two

Submitted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 12:01
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.

Fat Pang, part one

Submitted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on Tue, 09/28/2010 - 10:59
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.