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Pui-yin Lo
July 1 is the day Hong Kong celebrates the anniversary of its “return to the Motherland” and of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The United Kingdom, which administered Hong Kong as a colony from 1841 to 1997, uses “handover” instead, to mark this day. This difference is reflected in the Sino-British Joint Declaration (SBJD), a treaty the two countries concluded in 1984 to resolve the “Hong Kong Question.”1 Since 2014, when the United Kingdom began to act contentiously regarding Hong Kong seventeen years after the “handover,” it did so purportedly based on an “obligation” under the SBJD. On four occasions between 2015 and 2021, the United Kingdom complained of a “breach” of the SBJD by the PRC.2 The United States issued a presidential executive order on “Hong Kong Normalization” on July 14, 2020, to suspend or terminate “the different and preferential treatment of Hong Kong” from that granted to the PRC, which U.S. law had permitted since 1992. The executive order suggested that restoration would depend on how the PRC changes its actions to make Hong Kong “sufficiently autonomous” pursuant to the SBJD.3
