Fair enough regarding the people's consent. Looking at your subsequent comment you obviously know a lot more about the situation than I do. My mother was born in Hong Kong because my grandmother lived there for some years, but we barely have any connection to it.

(It is interesting that I can't tell from your comments whether you are arguing in support of the HK people or in support of the PRC. I find your writing curiously ambiguous on this.)

I would agree there was no people's consent in the usual meaning. But what my GP comment really means is a kind of passive consent of the people (along with active consent of the British government on their behalf), where the expressed anxieties and anger of the Hong Kong people were much more restrained in 1997 due to the Sino-British treaty and the adoption of the Hong Kong Basic Law, compared with what they would have been if they'd known China was going to dishonour those after signing them.

Even not considering consent, it looks clear to me that PRC has reneged on the high profile agreement it signed with Britain that was designed to protect the Hong Kong people and way of life as Britain departed.

From that I stand by my view that: "This should be borne in mind by anyone evaluating whether to trust China on any important agreement in future."

If I understand correctly: Although the Hong Kong Basic Law is a PRC national law as well as effectively the constitution of Hong Kong, it's existence and content is connected to the Sino-British treaty, and its adoption is a condition of the handover.

It cannot be regarded as an entirely "domestic" PRC thing, and it was not created by the PRC in isolation. There is ample evidence that the PRC no longer follows some fundamental tenets of the Basic Law (for example freedom of speech and freedom of assembly), and that now looks like a blatant contravention of the Sino-British treaty.

It looks to me like the situation is heading towards one where even if a resident has a BNO passport (a kind of British passport) and could theoretically move to Britain, they may be prevented from leaving Hong Kong by the PRC authorities.

You speak with what seems to be the perspective of someone who has lived under authoritarian rule and doesn’t grasp that although “consent” may not always be explicit, it is in fact required for any state to maintain legitimacy.

Funny, I didn't expect to hear the CCP's narrative here.

You're so wrong I don't know where to start.

What you seem to be implying is that, as long as the government stays in power and maintains a facade of stability, they can presume consent of the people for any policy they manage to implement.

This doesn't sound like somebody from a democracy would say, this sounds like what the CCP says. (Which is fine, I've said this myself (with some reservations).) But it doesn't even make sense in this context.

If you even had a inkling of knowledge of what happened during the 1980s when the talks were taking place:

- The vast majority of Hong Kong people preferred keeping status quo (UK continue to govern HK). There were polls to this effect. You could not have lived in the 1980s and 1990s in Hong Kong and not notice that almost _everything_ in the media (films, TV shows, songs) expressed the anxiety of the Hong Kong people to the brave new world after 1997

- Many people started migrating away upon hearing news of handover in 1997. It resulted in a huge brain drain.

- As such the Brits had to grant UK citizenship to a bunch of Hong Kong elites, middle class professionals and government officials, to placate them and convince them stay (because with UK citizenship they can leave any time they want, no hurry)

- The ones who did not have means to leave were mostly skeptical about the whole situation, but since people with influence were "bought out" by the Brits with UK citizenship, and you can't "fight" a government to "force" them to govern you, nothing serious happened.

I don't think _anyone_ who knows this part of Hong Kong history could even argue that there was consent among the Hong Kong people for the handover. It was a closed-doors deal between the UK and China with little regard to what Hong Kong people thought. In all fairness the UK did what it could do at the time, but claiming that Hong Kong people had "consent" is simply a misrepresentation of history. Using your weird arguments to negate historical fact is either ignorance, or willful negation of clearly recorded history.

People under authoritarian rule know full well that the fact that the government maintains power is not evidence that they support their policies. People running authoritarian governments use your argument all the time. I really don't know where you got your ideas from.

Also, it reeks of ad hominem - presuming where I have lived and my ignorance due to it. Perhaps you're just trolling and I shouldn't feed a troll, but this is one of the few topics where I'm obliged to keep the record straight.

Be that as it may… the people of Hong Kong (and Taiwan) seem to be very emphatically (with few exceptions) communicating a distrust of and desire to be independent from China and the CCP.