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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

It’s both. It’s a surprise as you indicated, but the agreement was that things should be left in place for a longer period of time (the acceleration part). China has thrown that part of the agreement out of the window, despite protests from the U.K. and others.

Personally, I think the anglosphere should allow Hong Kong citizens to relocate to their countries.

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> Personally, I think the anglosphere should allow Hong Kong citizens to relocate to their countries.

This is sort-of happening. The UK is making it easier for the Hong-Kongese to relocate to the UK and gain citizenship. Note "easier" doesn't mean "easy", and one needs to get out of HK first, presumably.

But speaking of the UK, it is a massive slap in its face. The UK brokered the unification agreement (not that they had much pragmatic choice but to give up HK), China is now not even pretending to honour it.

A bit like with Ukraine's deal to give up nuclear arms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit... . I'm amazed this has gone down so placidly.

> A bit like with Ukraine's deal to give up nuclear arms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit... . I'm amazed this has gone down so placidly.

It all depends on who's behind the wheel when stuff like this happens. I think once it became clear that Obama was more bark than bite Putin felt pretty confident in running amok.

It feels as if certain blocs are solidifying their grip for an upcoming event.

Events seems to be accelerating and it's beginning to make me nervous.

Flows and ebbs hopefully. I was born decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, but reading about it now, it must have felt like Armageddon. And yet it wasn’t, thankfully.

Of course eventually this doesn’t hold anymore.

I wonder what UK's strategy was when they made that decision. It was clear they'd have no leverage in enforcing the agreement. I've also always wondered why there was so much investments in HK based on expectation that the status-quo would prevail.

I feel really bad for the situation and what it suggests about the future. Yet I can't help but feel this was inevitable.

Taiwan however seems a couple orders of magnitude less likely on the short/medium term, I believe, unless the US loses it's edge quite dramatically. That's all just my speculation.

The UK didn't really have an alternative, I think.

UK "owned" Hong Kong "proper", i.e. what is called "Hong Kong island". This is a tiny fraction of the territory it was governing until 1997. The remaining territories were only leased, on fixed-term, from the Chinese government, with the lease running out in 1997.

Hong Kong Island is in no way self-sustainable as a foreign territory, much less so than even Gibraltar or the Falklands. Think owning downtown Manhattan, with the US hostile to the idea.

Still 23 years ago if the UK had just said "well we'll be keeping this indefinitely under the current terms," China would have had little recourse. They certainly wouldn't start a hot war with the UK, especially because they were still trying to make it on the world stage and HK was printing money for them at that point.

If the UK had tried that I'm quite certain there'd have been a hot conflict over this. China could have never accepted this. At the very least the PRC would have occupied the New Territories and stopped supplies.

Everything north of Hong Kong Island was going back to China anyway, under international law. For the UK to oppose that, without China's consent, would be below par for their standard of international politics.

Hong Kong Island is 80 km^2, surrounded by undisputably Chinese territory and waters. Most of it is mountainous rock you can't develop very much. Not even the airport lies on the island, and there is less than 1 km of sea between the island and territories returning to China anyway.

All of Hong Kong's water supplies are outside and would have been cut off.

Perhaps, but probably not right away. Water supplies are not hard to build - if you have the time. The UK could make nice with China long enough to build a desalination plant. I doubt China would want the international stain of shutting off water without warning. (They might have an "accident" shutting off water for a few hours)

Though I'm not sure the UK really gains anything either.

This was in the same decade that the USSR fell, it felt inevitable that communism would give-way to capitalism and indeed china was slowly allowing more freedom in the rest of the country, that's all been rolled back under Xi who I guess is a megalomaniac.

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