Meanwhile, more people kept moving in, and by 1956, the population of Hong Kong had soared to 2.5 million. In 1898, the British signed a new treaty that gave them control over the surrounding New Territories for 99 years.
And as mainland China underwent bouts of upheaval, several waves of Chinese refugees fled to Hong Kong. Chinese nationals flocked there for jobs building a new town. Hong Kong immediately became a hub for European traders eager to do business with China under British protection. British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston famously called it “a barren island with hardly a house upon it.”īut after Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain in the First Opium War, the British began developing and governing it with their law-based system. Official census data shows that only 7,450 people lived there. Before Britain raised its flag over the territory in 1841, Hong Kong Island was a sparsely inhabited area of just a few small fishing villages. And it is overwhelmingly positive history. The Communist regime may not see those treaties positively, but Hong Kong’s history as a British colony is undeniable. The teaching conforms with a ccp stance dating back to 1972, when China pressured the United Nations to remove Hong Kong from a list of British colonies because the ccp didn’t recognize treaties the Qing Dynasty and later Chinese governments had signed with the British. New textbooks for use in Hong Kong schools teach that the city was never a colony of Great Britain, the South China Morning Post reported on June 13.įour new sets of books, used for high school civics classes, teach that since the Chinese Communist Party ( ccp) doesn’t recognize the 19th-century agreements that gave Great Britain control of Hong Kong, the territory was never a British colony.
0 kommentar(er)
