The barren island ceded to Britain in the wreckage of the First Opium War that became one of Asia’s richest cities, long known for open markets, rule of law, and unusually broad civil liberties — a meeting point of China and the West — then returned to China in 1997 under a promise of fifty years of autonomy, and after 2019 the front line of a contested struggle over what that promise meant.
Hong Kong was a place on borrowed time, and everyone knew the clock. A British official once dismissed it as a barren rock with hardly a house on it. Britain took the island anyway in 1842, after a war fought to keep selling opium to China, then leased the surrounding land for ninety-nine years in 1898. That lease set the deadline. When it ran out, the whole city would go back to China. It did, in 1997, under a promise that its capitalist system, civil liberties, and high degree of autonomy would last for fifty years. The barren rock had become one of Asia’s richest cities, long known for open markets, rule of law, and unusually broad civil liberties. What that promise was worth is now bitterly contested.