Sino-British Joint Declaration

The Sino-British Joint Declaration was a treaty signed between the United Kingdom (UK) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1984 that set the conditions in which the entirety of colonial Hong Kong would be transferred to Chinese control and how the territory shall be governed after 1 July 1997. Hong Kong first became a colony of the British Empire in 1842 after it had defeated Qing China in the First Opium War, acquiring Hong Kong Island. Its territory was expanded on two occasions; first in 1860 with the addition of Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island during the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, and again in 1898 when the UK obtained a 99-year lease for the New Territories shortly after the First Sino-Japanese War. From 1941 to 1945, the colony was occupied by the Japanese Empire but returned to British control after World War II. The date of the handover in 1997 marked the end of these leases. The PRC government declared in the treaty its basic policies for governing Hong Kong after the transfer. A special administrative region (SAR) would be established in the territory that would be self-governing with a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign affairs and defence. Hong Kong would maintain its existing governing and economic systems separate from that of mainland China under the principle of "one country, two systems". This blueprint would be elaborated on in the Hong Kong Basic Law (the post-handover regional constitution) and the central government's policies for the territory were to remain unchanged for a period of at least 50 years after 1997. Since 2014, the PRC government has stated that it considers the treaty to be spent with no further legal effect, while the UK government maintains that the document still remains binding in operation. Following the PRC's government imposition of a national security legislation on Hong Kong in 2020 and a 2021 National People's Congress decision to approve a rework of local election laws that reduces the number of regional legislature seats elected by the public, the UK has declared the PRC as being in a "state of ongoing non-compliance" with the Joint Declaration.