Who ruled Hong Kong?

Hong Kong occupies a hilly island, a peninsula and a scatter of smaller islands on the east side of the Pearl River estuary on the south China coast. Its deep, sheltered harbour between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon is the reason it exists as a city. For most of its history it was a rural fringe of Guangdong province; then, in a little over 150 years as a British colony, it grew into one of the world's great ports and financial centres. Since 1997 it has been a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China.

Archaeologists have found Stone Age settlements along the coast, and a brick tomb of the Eastern Han period at Lei Cheng Uk shows that Chinese culture had reached the area by the early centuries CE. The region was brought under Chinese administration when the armies of the Qin conquered the far south in the 3rd century BCE, and it later formed part of successive coastal counties of Guangdong. Its people farmed, fished and made salt, and incense trees were grown for trade. In the 1270s, as the Mongols overran the Song dynasty, the last Song court fled through the area. In the 1510s Portuguese traders set up briefly on the coast nearby before Ming dynasty forces drove them away. In the 1660s the early Qing dynasty forced the coastal population inland to deny support to Ming loyalists, and the area was resettled afterwards, partly by Hakka farmers.

Hong Kong's modern history begins with the First Opium War. British forces occupied Hong Kong Island in January 1841, and the Treaty of Nanking ceded it to Britain in 1842. The Kowloon peninsula was added in 1860, after the Second Opium War, and in 1898 Britain obtained a 99-year lease on the much larger New Territories. The colony became a free port and an entrepôt for the China trade, and Chinese migrants, merchants and labourers made up the great majority of its people.

Japan invaded on 8 December 1941 and the British surrendered on Christmas Day; the occupation, which lasted until August 1945, was marked by hunger and a sharp fall in population. After the war, and especially after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, refugees poured in from the mainland. Their labour and capital turned Hong Kong into a manufacturing centre for textiles, toys and electronics, and from the 1970s into a hub of finance and services. Riots in 1966 and 1967 led to reforms in housing and administration.

Because the New Territories lease would expire in 1997, Britain and China negotiated the colony's future. The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, signed by Margaret Thatcher and the Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang, provided that all of Hong Kong would return to Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997 under the principle of "one country, two systems", proposed by Deng Xiaoping. The Basic Law promised that Hong Kong's capitalist system, legal system and way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years.

Since the handover, disputes over how Hong Kong should be governed have shaped its politics. Large protests took place in 2003, 2014 and 2019, the last of them triggered by a proposed law allowing extradition to mainland China. In 2020 the central government in Beijing introduced a National Security Law for the city, followed in 2021 by changes to the electoral system. The Chinese and Hong Kong governments say these measures restored stability and order; critics, including many foreign governments and human rights groups, say they have sharply curtailed freedoms promised at the handover. Hong Kong remains one of the world's leading financial centres, with about 7.5 million people living in one of the most densely built cities on earth.