Background
The background of the Sino-British Joint Declaration was the pending expiration of the lease of the New Territories on 1 July 1997. The lease was negotiated between the UK and the Guangxu Emperor of China, and was for a period of 99 years starting from 1 July 1898 under the Second Convention of Peking. At the time of the lease signing, Hong Kong Island had already been ceded to the UK in perpetuity under the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 after the First Opium War, and the southern part of the Kowloon Peninsula as well as the Stonecutters Island had also been ceded to the UK in perpetuity under the Convention of Beijing in 1860 after the Second Opium War.
In the late 1970s the territory and foreign investors were concerned about the future of Hong Kong. The main problem was about land lease in the New Territories which was set to expire in 1997. With the visit of the Governor of Hong Kong, Murray MacLehose, in Peking in March 1979 the discussion about the future of Hong Kong began. An attempt was made to solve the question of land lease expiring in 1997. The first discussions begun with Chairman Deng Xiaoping of the PRC during the visit of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, to China in September 1982.
During the following discussions, where the Governor of Hong Kong took part in every round of formal talks as a member of the British delegation, it became clear that the continuation of British administration after 1997 would not be acceptable to China in any form. The Chinese Government has consistently taken the view that the whole of Hong Kong should be Chinese territory, due to what they perceived as the inequality of historical treaties. As a result the two sides discussed other effective measures than continued British administration and came up with the concept of Hong Kong as a Special Administration Region of the PRC. In April 1984 the two sides concluded the initial discussion of these matters and arranged that Hong Kong would retain a high degree of autonomy under Chinese sovereignty with the preservation of the maintained lifestyle in Hong Kong. By 18 September 1984 both sides had approved the English and Chinese texts of the documents and the associated Exchange of Memoranda.
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