Hong Kong 25 years later: Why it matters for the US

Jacob Stokes, fellow for the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said that China’s breach of “one country, two systems” for Hong Kong has sharpened the risks facing Taiwan and its democratic government.

The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which laid the groundwork for Hong Kong’s handover from the U.K. to China 13 years later, stated that Beijing would treat the territory as a special administrative region — part of the larger country of China, but with its own separate, democratic system that was developed over a century and a half of British colonial rule.

“‘One country, two systems’ eroded, sort of, like one goes bankrupt, a little bit at a time and then all at once,” Stokes said.

“It’s really sharpened a set of views, not just in Hong Kong, of course, but in Taiwan too, about what exactly closer political, legal, economic, technological integration with China would look like and has really made the choice quite stark.”

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