During the Japanese invasion of China, two separate "false regimes" appeared, simpering puppets of the Japanese bandits both: the "Nanjing government" and the "Manchukuo" state. In both, enormous numbers of Chinese traitors served in puppet armies.
Lu Xun once diagnosed the rottenness underlying the Chinese nation: "China loves to say that it loves peace. But in reality, it loves to fight, loves when other things fight, and loves when its own people fight. It just doesn't dare fight with foreign invaders."
In the same year, the British magazine "Punch" evaluated the Treaty of Nanjing thusly:
"The poppy war is over. With our bullets and gunpowder we've taught the benighted Chinese people an important lesson, and made an impressive profit besides. But money is beside the point. John Bull used so much gunpowder, so many bullets on the Chinese people, put so much pig iron to use, thus he'll get a lordly compensation. He used the blood of two or three thousand two-legged animals (Chinese people's lives) to dispose of the barbarians. Apart from the money and the pomp, we've also gotten five Chinese ports opened to British trade. The politicians and salesmen are wild with joy with their hopes for profits, imagining the Chinese emperor wearing shirts made in Manchester, and his wives and concubines in Manchester cotton shirts, and all the court officials holding Sheffield cutlery."
The essay also spoke of the British's contempt for China as "a beaten, joyless people, shameless slaves of a broken nation."
The American president at the time took China's experience as a cautionary lesson, warning his countrymen: "We must not do as China did. If we follow the same disastrous policies as China, if we remain complacent and self-satisfied, and seek to live in peaceful pleasure inside our own borders, we will slip gradually into corruption and decadence, losing all interest in affairs outside our own country, indulging ourselves in lives of luxury, the noble life of struggle, hard work and risk all but forgotten, the entire day spent satisfying the transient desires of the flesh. There would then doubtless come a day where we found ourselves as China is today: a race fearful of conflict, closed-off, covetous of pleasure and quiet, at the mercy of warlike, risk-loving peoples."
Foreign powers divvied China up, ate its flesh and drank its blood. And then they turned around and scorned China—they mocked it and used as a cautionary tale for their own people.
During the hundred and forty years from 1842 to 1982, the Chinese government, time and time again, did its best to get back Hong Kong. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference following the end of the First World War, the famous Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo fearlessly stood up to the tyrannical machinations of Japan, America, England, and France as they tried to divide up their ill-gotten gains, refusing to sign the treaty so as to protect Chinese sovereignty in Shandong. The conference ignored completely the issue of Hong Kong.
In 1943 at the Cairo Conference, Chiang Kai-shek believed that China had become the UK's ally, sharing the same foxhole, as it were. He sent Wellington Koo to England to sound Churchill out, asking him, "Prime Minister Churchill, we're allies. After our victory, might you give some thought to the Hong Kong question?" , only to receive Churchill's haughty, unyielding retort: "What the hell are you doing bringing that up?"
The weakness and impotence of the country's government meant that its repeated efforts could yield only a knowing, regretful lament: "Ignorant, backward China … when will you rise again?"
"Hong Kong is not the Malvinas, and China is not Argentina!"
On October 1, 1949, The People's Republic of China was established.
On October 17, the People's Liberation Army completed its southward sweep, liberating Guangzhou all the way down to Shenzhen. Hong Kong authorities mistakenly thought the PLA would attack Hong Kong, and pressed 4,500 people into emergency military service. But the PLA made no moves towards Hong Kong, instead bringing its advance to a halt on the far shore of the Shenzhen River. Lieutenant General Wu Fushan, commander of the 44th Corps of the 4th Field Army, stood by the river's shore, took a look at Hong Kong through a pair of binoculars, then turned heel and departed.
The PRC central government instructed the army that there was no rush to take back Hong Kong, saying that it would "play the long game, and press our advantages." But the government of New China's attitude towards the issue of Hong Kong sovereignty was resolute; it made a number of adamant proclamations in the international forum, saying that "Hong Kong is not a British colony. Hong Kong is Chinese territory! We will not recognize any unequal treaty forcibly imposed on the heads of the Chinese people! At the appropriate time we will take the appropriate measures to resolve the issue of Hong Kong."
In March of 1972, during the 27th session of the UN General Assembly, Chinese Ambassador to the UN Huang Hua requested that Hong Kong and Macau be struck from the list of colonized regions maintained by the UN's Special Committee on Decolonization. In response to the Chinese government's request, the general assembly passed a resolution striking both territories from a list of colonized regions maintained in compliance with the UN's "Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples." The sleeping lion of the East had finally awakened.
The day was September 24, 1982.
One hundred and forty years had passed since the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing between Britain and the Qing government.
