Hong Kong’s colony status and right to self-determination: why this is problematic for Beijing

4 July 2022

Newer Hong Kong school textbooks claim that Hong Kong was never a British colony. This claim raised eyebrows worldwide on the eve of the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s sovereignty handover to China. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a colony is “a country or an area that is governed by people from another, more powerful, country”. The definition in China’s predominant internet search engine, Baidu, is even more specific: a colony is a nation or an area subject to economic exploitation, cultural invasion, and political domination by a suzerain state. As such, Hong Kong under British rule was, by all means, a British colony. It is just like someone married to you is, by definition, your spouse.

Many Chinese officials and Communist Party mouthpieces have referred to pre-1997 Hong Kong as a British colony. After all, Chinese Communist Party official historiography characterises China between the 1839-1842 Opium War and the 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic as a “half colony, half feudal society”. If even pre-1949 China itself was considered a “half colony”, why couldn't pre-1997 Hong Kong, fully under British administration, be called a colony?

The UN decolonisation declaration and the colonies list

As I point out in City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule, Beijing’s position that British Hong Kong was a “Chinese territory under British colonial rule”, instead of a British Colony, has been a long-standing rigid party line — however grotesque it may sound. Behind this position is a cynical move that served the specific purpose of stripping the Hong Kong people of their pre-existing right to self-determination under international law.

The more Beijing does to impose a rewriting of history to deny that Hong Kong was ever a colony, the more the international community will become aware of the fact that Hong Kong has never exercised its right to self-determination, as warranted by its past colony status during decolonisation.

In 1960, the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV)), or the ‘declaration on decolonisation’. It specifies that people in Non-Self-Governing Territories (or colonies) enjoy the “right to self-determination” and the “right to complete independence”. The General Assembly also passed resolution 1541 (XV) in 1960 and resolution 2625 (XXV) in 1970, with the latter stating that the “establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people”.

The UN maintained a list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (‘the colonies list’) where residents enjoyed this right to self-determination. Hong Kong and Macau were on the list as British and Portuguese colonies. The purpose of the UN Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (or the ‘Special Committee on Decolonisation’) was to oversee the exercise of colonised peoples’ right to self-determination. Over the years, non-self-governing territories were taken off the UN’s colonies list as they attained self-determination via referendum, either to become independent states, join the governing country (like Hawaii becoming a US state), or join a neighbouring state (like part of British Cameroon joining Nigeria). Under this framework, the future path for the decolonisation of Hong Kong and Macau would have to involve a free referendum for their residents.

For obvious reasons, Beijing did not like the prospect of Hong Kong and Macau residents having a say in their own future. In these two places, it could not tolerate any referendum that could open the door to independence. Right after the People’s Republic of China joined the UN, China’s UN permanent representative, Huang Hua, sent a letter to the Special Committee on decolonisation in March 1972 to demand that the UN take Hong Kong and Macau off the colonies list. The letter stated that both were “part of Chinese territory occupied by British and Portuguese authorities” and “[t]he settlement of the questions of Hong Kong and Macau does not at all fall under the ordinary category of ‘colonial Territories’”. Beijing succeeded. Hong Kong and Macau were taken off the list.

In the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping decided it was time to resolve the Hong Kong question, the issue was handled through Beijing-London diplomatic negotiation without any participation by Hong Kong residents. During the negotiation, a public opinion poll in Hong Kong showed that the majority of Hong Kong residents preferred to maintain British rule, and independence was more popular than Chinese rule. Any exercise of self-determination by a referendum among Hong Kong residents at the time would have resulted in a rejection of Chinese rule. But Beijing’s 1972 move to take Hong Kong off the colonies list paid off, as it pre-empted any advocacy for determining Hong Kong’s future through a local referendum, as had been the case in the decolonisation process of most other places on the UN’s colonies list.

Hong Kong’s unfulfilled right to self-determination

But some legal scholars contended that the UN’s decision to take Hong Kong and Macau off the colonies list failed to follow due process. It was also suggested that the UN General Assembly did not have the authority to override the right to self-determination of any peoples. The UN was not empowered to take any place off the colonies list without the colonised peoples exercising their right to self-determination. This argument suggests that the delisting of Hong Kong, as well as the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong sovereignty handover, may have been illegal, as they all lack legitimation through referendum by the Hong Kong people.

As explosive as it sounds, this argument never obtained much attention. After all, even the mainstream of the Hong Kong democratic movement, whose position of supporting the Hong Kong sovereignty handover was at odds with the majority of public opinion and who maintained good relations with Beijing until their breakup after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, fully supported Beijing’s position over Hong Kong sovereignty. The situation changed when the Hong Kong democratic movement took a localist turn in the 2010s. From the 2014 Occupy Movement to the 2019 uprising in Hong Kong, the voice for Hong Kong independence emerged, and this voice for self-determination became mainstream. Young radicals reopened the call for Hong Kong’s pre-existing right to self-determination and accused Beijing of stripping them of this right. Beijing felt the urgency to restate that Hong Kong was never a colony and therefore never enjoyed the right to self-determination.

With the opposition movement repressed by the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020, it is unlikely that any political movement calling for Hong Kong’s self-determination will re-emerge any time soon. But with the exodus of Hong Kong residents after 2020, an opposition movement in exile has been taking shape. With this emerging diasporic movement and escalating confrontation between China and the Western world, Beijing has all the more reasons to worry that this question of Hong Kong’s status and self-determination will return.

When Beijing doubled down to deny Hong Kong’s status as a colony before the handover, it just drew more international attention to the issue and helped keep the question of its status alive. The more Beijing does to impose a rewriting of history to deny that Hong Kong was ever a colony, the more the international community will become aware of the fact that Hong Kong has never exercised its right to self-determination, as warranted by its past colony status during decolonisation. Beijing has trapped itself in a dilemma.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. & Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Sociology Department and School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Clash of Empires: From 'Chimerica' to the 'New Cold War', City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule, The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World, and Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty. His analyses of the Chinese and global political economy and of Hong Kong politics have been featured or cited in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BBC News, The Guardian, Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil), The Straits Times (Singapore), Xinhua Monthly, People’s Daily, among other publications. Image credit: Wikimedia/Voice of America.