The free world has abandoned Hong Kong

Forty years ago today, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and China’s Premier Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international treaty designed to pave the way for the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997. Meeting in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, leaders of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) regime promised to respect a ‘high degree of autonomy’ for Hong Kong and uphold the territory’s way of life, including its basic freedoms and the rule of law for at least fifty years from the time of the handover. 

They lied – or at least, they broke their promises. Forty years on, that treaty – registered at the United Nations – and the promises within it lie in tatters. Xi Jinping’s CCP regime has ripped it up and trampled on it, dismantling almost all of Hong Kong’s freedoms, undermining the rule of law and unleashing a takeover of the city that leaves it an autonomous region only in name. 

I lived in Hong Kong for the first five years after the handover, and I would say from my experience that – at least on the surface – in the early years, Beijing by and large kept to its word.