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JUDITH M. BROWN AND ROSEMARY FOOT, EDS, Hong Kong'S Transitions, 1842-1997. London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1997 (St Antony's Series), pp 213, ISBN 0-333-67362-X (UK); 0-312-17420-9 (USA), 40.00.
MICHAEL YAHUDA, Hong Kong: China's Challenge. London: Routledge, 1996, pp 171, ISBN 0-415-14070-6, hardback, 37.50; ISBN 0-415-14071-4, paperback, 11.99.
Watching the television coverage of the ceremonies marking the restoration of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty on 30 June 1997, it was hard not to become sentimental. Whatever one's views of the people and policies involved on both sides, there was no doubt that the lashing rain, the two impeccable honour guards performing their varied duties, the lowering of one flag and the raising of the other, the tears, the arrivals and departures, conspired together to create the sense of history in the making. Here, surely, was a significant event.
And of course it was. Although until Macau returns to China in 1999, there will still be a European enclave on the coast of China, the return of Hong Kong was always going to be the significant occasion, given its size, economic clout and the historical role of the British in China. The ceremonies on 30 June and 1 July 1997 marked the real end of a long historical wave, which began in the 15th century, peaked in the 19th, and will finally fade with the end of the 20th. As historical movements go, that is not a bad span, well able to hold its own with empires on which the sun never sets, and similar such grandiose claims.
These two books deal with Hong Kong's past, and its possible future. Yahuda's predates that edited by Brown and Foot, yet for a review it logically comes before the first. This is partly because Yahuda contributes the final essay to the first work, covering some of the same ground which his own book, Hong Kong: China's Challenge then develops in more detail. Taken together, the two books provide a series of interesting perspectives on what Hong Kong has meant and may mean to the British and the Chinese in the 150 years of its existence as a British Crown Colony. The Brown and Foot volume is the product of a seminar held at Oxford one year before...