Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHINA'S HONG KONG INVASION PLAN
The peaceful agreement that eventually settled the status of Hong Kong was by no
means a foregone conclusion in the decades leading up to it. The key negotiators have
since revealed just how touchy China felt about Hong Kong and how close it came to
retaking the territory by force.
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who negotiated the deal, said later
that Deng Xiaoping, then China's leader, told her he 'could walk in and take the whole
lot this afternoon'.
She replied that China would lose everything if it did. 'There is nothing I could do to
stop you,' she said, 'but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like.'
Lu Ping, the top Chinese negotiator, recently confirmed that this was no bluff on
Deng's part. Deng feared that announcing the date for the 1997 handover would pro-
voke serious unrest in Hong Kong, and China would be compelled to invade as a res-
ult.
According to Lu, China had also been hours away from invading during 1967, at the
height of the chaotic Cultural Revolution, when a radical faction of the People's Libera-
tion Army (PLA) was poised to invade the British colony during procommunist riots.
The invasion was called off only by a late-night order from Premier Zhou Enlai to the
local army commander, Huang Yongsheng, a radical Maoist who had been itching to
invade.
Hong Kong Post-1997
Almost as soon as the euphoria of the 1997 handover faded, things started going badly in
Hong Kong. The financial crisis that had rocked other parts of Asia began to be felt in Hong
Kong at the end of 1997. A strain of deadly avian flu saw the city slaughter more than one
million chickens.
The credibility of the SAR administration was severely damaged in 1999 when the gov-
ernment challenged a High Court ruling that upheld residency rights for China-born off-
spring of Hong Kong citizens, regardless of the parents' residency status at the time of the
child's birth. The ruling was based on certain clauses of the Basic Law, and the government
calculated that it would potentially make 1.67 million people from the mainland eligible for
right of abode in the territory. The SAR administration appealed to the standing committee
of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's rubber-stamp parliament, to reinterpret
these clauses. The NPC complied, and ruled that at least one parent must already have ac-
quired permanent residency status at the time of the birth.
