Sino-British Joint Declaration - Commentaries

Commentaries

The signing of the Joint Declaration by the Conservative Party government of Margaret Thatcher was a cause of controversy in Britain at the time: some were surprised that the right wing Prime Minister would agree to such an arrangement with the Communist government of China represented by Deng Xiaoping. But, as stated in the notes of The Hong Kong Baptist University: “The alternative to acceptance of the present agreement is to have no agreement.” Some were surprised that Hong Kong residents were not given full UK citizenship. The Joint Declaration would also have to have been signed by HM Queen Elizabeth II and the President of China, Li Xiannian.

However, many commentaries pointed out that Britain was in an extremely weak negotiating position. Hong Kong was not militarily defensible and received most of its water and food supply from Guangdong province in mainland China. It was therefore considered economically infeasible to divide Hong Kong, with the UK retaining control for Hong Kong Island and Kowloon while returning the New Territories to the PRC in 1997, if no agreements could be reached by then. As mortgages for property in Hong Kong were typically fifteen years, without reaching an agreement on the future of Hong Kong in the early 1980s, it was feared that the property market would collapse, causing a collapse of the general economy in Hong Kong. Constraints in the land lease in the New Terrorities were also pressing problems at that time. In fact, while negotiation concerning the future of Hong Kong had started in the late 1970s, the final timing of the Declaration was related to the land and property factors.

Some commentaries pointed out that the UK government had no interest in granting full UK citizenship to Hong Kong Chinese residents. In fact, the UK government changed its nationality laws just a few years before the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration to ensure that Hong Kong Chinese residents would not get the right to live in the UK in future.

But on the other hand, Wu Bangguo, the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress stated in a conference in Beijing 2007, that “Hong Kong had considerable autonomy only because the central government had chosen to authorize that autonomy”.