>P.S. You just learned why China wanted Hong Kong back in 1997.
KEK….The lease was up….everything you posted was pure bunch of BULLSHIT ..kekekek..
A lease no one thought would run out
Considering that China could have taken Hong Kong back at any time and that Britain has long been a reluctant colonial power in its last major overseas territory, why is the colony reverting to Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997?
In formal terms the answer lies in the second Convention of Peking, signed on 9 June 1898. The ailing Qing Dynasty leased the New Territories to Britain for 99 years, starting 1 July 1898. The new additions were to make up 90 per cent of Hong Kong's land mass. The term of 99 years was fixed almost casually. Both sides believed the new lands would remain British for ever, along with the original colonial possession of Hong Kong island, acquired in 1842. The British empire would never die.
The lease was signed in the midst of a flurry of European colonial expansion in China. Britain did not want to be left out, but it was prepared to let China's rulers save face by not insisting the territory should be ceded in perpetuity.
As early as 1909 Governor Sir Frederick Lugard suggested the New Territories be ceded permanently to Britain as a condition for the return of the British concession of Weihaiwei to China. In the event, Weihaiwei was returned to China in 1930, without any of the conditions suggested by Sir Frederick two decades previously.
When the Qing Dynasty fell and the nationalist government was installed, it declared it would not accept the "unequal treaties" that gave Hong Kong to Britain. The nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, with the support of the United States, put pressure on Britain to hand Hong Kong back after the Second World War but Churchill would have none of it.