Hong Kong

Locator map for Hong Kong, a special administrative region in the southeast of China. The region is made up of Hong Kong Island, the mainland Kowloon Peninsula and New Territories, and many small islands.

Ships in Aberdeen Harbour, Hong Kong. The world's largest floating restaurant is moored in this ancient fishing port on the southern side of the island.

Aerial view of Hong Kong at night. The harbour and skyscrapers are brilliantly lit, enabling the life of the city to continue around the clock.

The towering skyscrapers of the central district, Hong Kong. Land is scarce in this small but highly prosperous region of China. After more than one hundred and fifty years of British influence and administration, full sovereignty over Hong Kong was handed back to the communist Chinese government in 1997. One result of this was a contraction of Hong Kong's economy.

Special administrative region directly under the central government in the southeast of China, comprising Hong Kong Island, the mainland Kowloon Peninsula and New Territories, and many small islands, of which the largest is Lantau; area 1,070 sq km/413 sq mi; population (2001 est) 6,708,400 (57% Hong Kong Chinese, most of the remainder are refugees from the mainland). A long-established and continuing policy of free trade has helped the rise of Hong Kong as one of the world's major commercial and financial centres. The capital buildings are located in Victoria (Hong Kong City), and other towns and cities include Kowloon and Tsuen Wan (in the New Territories). A former British crown colony, it reverted to Chinese control in July 1997.

From 1997 an enclave of Guangdong province, China, Hong Kong has one of the world's finest natural harbours. Hong Kong Island is connected with Kowloon by undersea railway and ferries. A world financial centre, its stock market has four exchanges. Main exports are textiles, clothing, electronic goods, office machinery, clocks, watches, cameras, and plastic products; tourism is also important to the economy. Entrepôt trade is very significant: a large proportion of the exports and imports (mainly consumer goods, raw materials and semi-manufactured goods) of southern China are transshipped here. The currency used is the Hong Kong dollar; the languages spoken are English and Chinese; religions include Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, with Muslim and Christian minorities.

Government Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region within China, with a chief executive. There is an executive council, comprising a mixture of business and political figures, and, from May 1998, an elected legislative council. Until reversion to Chinese control in July 1997 Hong Kong was a British dependency administered by a crown-appointed governor who presided over an unelected executive council, composed of 4 ex-officio and 11 nominated members, and a legislative council composed of 3 ex-officio members, 18 appointees, and 39 elected members.

History Formerly part of China, Hong Kong Island was occupied by Britain in 1841, during the first of the Opium Wars, and ceded by China under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking. The Kowloon Peninsula was acquired under the 1860 Beijing (Peking) Convention and the New Territories were secured on a 99-year lease from 1898. The colony, which developed into a major centre for Sino-British trade during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was occupied by Japan from 1941 to 1945. The restored British administration promised, after 1946, to increase self-government. These plans were shelved, however, after the 1949 communist revolution in China.

During the 1950s almost 1 million Chinese (predominantly Cantonese) refugees fled to Hong Kong. Immigration continued during the 1960s and 1970s, raising the colony's population from 1 million in 1946 to 5 million in 1980, leading to the imposition of strict border controls during the 1980s. From 1975, 160,000 Vietnamese boat people fled to Hong Kong; in 1991 some 61,000 remained. The UK government began forced repatriation in 1989. Hong Kong's economy expanded rapidly during the corresponding period and the colony became one of Asia's major commercial, financial, and industrial centres, boasting the world's busiest container port from 1987.

Negotiations on Hong Kong's future were opened between the UK and China in 1982. These culminated in 1984 in an agreement that Britain would transfer full sovereignty of the islands and New Territories to China in 1997 in return for Chinese assurance that Hong Kong's social and economic freedom and capitalist lifestyle would be preserved for at least 50 years.

As plans for the transfer became more detailed, fears that China would exert more control than agreed led to tensions between the UK and China. Tung Chee-hwa, a Shanghai-born shipping magnate, was elected by a 400-member Chinese-established selection committee, to become the first chief executive (replacing the British-appointed governor) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) when Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997.

Tung announced that the new executive council would comprise a mixture of business and political figures with strong links with mainland China. In February 1997 the Chinese parliament voted to dilute substantially Hong Kong's bill of rights and freedoms of association and assembly after the July 1997 handover.

The Hong Kong economy contracted by 4% during the first half of 1998, the stock market crashed to a five-year-low, and unemployment reached a 15-year high, as the region suffered from the financial crisis that had engulfed southeast Asia since 1997.

Preparing to be a special administrative region Under the ‘one country, two systems’ agreement, in 1997 Hong Kong became a special administrative region within China, with its own laws, currency, budget, and tax system, and retaining its free-port status and authority to negotiate separate international trade agreements.

In preparation for its withdrawal from the colony, the British government in 1984 introduced indirect elections to select a portion of the new legislative council, and direct elections for seats on lower-tier local councils in 1985. A Sino-British joint liaison group was also established to monitor the functioning of the new agreement, and a 59-member committee (including 25 representatives from Hong Kong) formed in Beijing in 1985 to draft a new constitution.

In December 1989 the UK government granted British citizenship to 225,000 Hong Kong residents, beginning in 1997. In March 1990 the 59-member committee agreed to a ‘Basic Law’ with 18 directly elected members of the legislative council from 1991, rising to 30 in 2003 (out of a total of 60). Proposals for greater democracy announced by the colony's new governor, Chris Patten, in November 1992, were supported by Hong Kong's legislative council despite strong criticism from the Chinese government. The legislature approved Patten's first two reform bills in December 1993 and February 1994 respectively, as a result of which China vowed to disband all elected bodies when it took control in 1997.

A 150-member committee responsible for overseeing Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese sovereignty was appointed by the Chinese government in December 1995. The committee, consisting of 94 citizens from Hong Kong and 56 from China, was formed to choose an election committee, which in turn would select a chief executive to succeed the British governor of Hong Kong. The committee would also decide which of Hong Kong's laws were to be amended or repealed in mid-1997, and who would serve in the provisional government.

In the first fully democratic elections to the legislative council in September 1995, the Democratic Party, led by Martin Lee, took 19 of the 25 seats. The party supported further reforms and opposed Chinese rule. On Hong Kong's handover, however, the elected legislative council was replaced by an appointed council, pending elections under revised rules in May 1998.

Hong Kong's incoming government of April 1997 confirmed its critics' worst fears by clearly stating that draconian curbs would be imposed on the operations of political organizations and the right to protest after the handover of the colony to China at the end of June. The office of Tung Chee-Hwa, chief executive of the incoming government, set out a programme for reviving some of the most restrictive curbs on the rights to dissent, and introducing measures clearly targeted at weakening Hong Kong's large pro-democracy organizations.

The Democratic Party won the most seats in elections in 2000, although no party secured overall control and voter turnout was low. Hong Kong surrendered one of its last remaining claims to autonomy on 11 July 2001, when its legislature passed a law that would allow the Chinese government to sack the territory's leader. Pro-democracy members of the legislature and opposition groups decried the controversial vote as a further erosion of the ‘one country, two systems’ guarantee that was made to Hong Kong by the British and Chinese governments before the handover.

Tung Chee-Hwa resigned in 2005 due to ill-health, and was succeeded as chief executive by Donald Tsang, who had served in the Hong Kong civil service under several British governors.