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From Empire Defence to Imperial Retreat: Britain's Postwar China Policy and the Decolonization of Hong Kong

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

James T. H. Tang
James T. H. Tang
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
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Extract

Attempts to examine Hong Kong as an issue in British postwar colonial policy often emphasize the unique nature of the colony, and therefore a special case in British decolonization. Hong Kong has been regarded as an unconventional colonial entity, an anachronism in the modern world. But others argue that the word colony is not an appropriate term to describe it, except in the most severely technical legal sense, because of its spectacular industrial and economic development since the end of the Second World War. Nonetheless, Hong Kong has existed as a British crown colony since 1842, and its colonial political structures have remained more or less the same until the early 1980s. Hong Kong's special relations with China is an important factor making it an oddity in post-war British decolonization. Instead of becoming independent like most other British colonialterritories, Hong Kong's political future is linked to China. This situation of ‘decolonization without independence’ has been an important theme of academic analysis on the colony's political development.

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Articles
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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , May 1994 , pp. 317 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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