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UK retains more of the British empire post 1945

I thought about something like this in a France Fights On scenario. With a stronger Anglo-French bond postwar and a weaker Anglo-American one, this isn't really impossible.

How do you reconcile it with African demands for self-government though? Remember Britain's relationship with its African colonies was different from that of France. And there's the issue of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia to consider.
 
Respectfully, I must disagree, and I don't believe that Britain and Italy are comparable in terms of strength at this point. I wouldn't call 1898 Italy a Great Power.


And my other points? I don't mean to be rude, but late Victorian diplomacy is my professional field. I've done the reading on this. I've sat in the archives. My point is not that Britain and Italy are equivalent powers, my point is that the Qing do not simply have to roll over- Britain could extract more concessions, but it would need good reason to do so given that it would come at a serious cost elsewhere. If you think otherwise, that's fine, but you won't convince me with 'I must disagree.'
 
Let's imagine this scenario: a staunchly Communist China that's picked up the baton from a still-extant but weakened USSR as the main threat in the Cold War against the capitalist world. This China is not as strong economically as OTL's China was in 1997. It's actively hostile against both the UK and the USA, who have a much closer relationship in OTL, and are as staunchly anti-Communist as they were in say the 1960s. Purely for the purposes of discussion, how would it get Hong Kong back without risking war?

The Macau precedent, where it basically gains control from the colonial powers while leaving the latter in a figurehead state. Many Hong Kongers were Chinese nationalists, and due to the particular context here the PRC was considered the more attractive option at the time (more so than Jiang's dictatorship on Taiwan at the time) - indeed, from the outset, the original original plan to gradually integrate Hong Kong into China, until the Sino-British Joint Declaration was announced as a compromise, was basically to follow the same playbook as Macau, and if Beijing was more smart about using it, they'd cut off the electrical, drinking water, and sewer treatment supplies to HK as a way of ramping up the pressure. Even a more anti-Communist UK would not be able to hold back that tide.
 
Let's imagine this scenario: a staunchly Communist China that's picked up the baton from a still-extant but weakened USSR as the main threat in the Cold War against the capitalist world. This China is not as strong economically as OTL's China was in 1997. It's actively hostile against both the UK and the USA, who have a much closer relationship in OTL, and are as staunchly anti-Communist as they were in say the 1960s. Purely for the purposes of discussion, how would it get Hong Kong back without risking war?

It's worth noting that Britain recognized the Communists as the legitimate rulers of China almost immediately. So they wouldn't be 'as staunchly anti-Communist as they were in say the 1960s,' they would be much more anti-communist. In such a case, I'd expect the Chinese to keep putting pressure on Hong Kong right through the middle of the century. When this timeline's equivalent to the 1967 riots roll around, I wouldn't expect alt-Zhou Enlai to veto the plan for the PLA to occupy the city.

The USA will be glad, because once again they get nothing out of British Hong Kong, any more than they did out of Portuguese Goa. Even the maddest Domino Theorists know there's better lines of defence.

But, to return to your scenario:


If there's a PRC it's a post 1898 POD (otherwise southern China begins to look different quite rapidly, which will have serious knock on effects for Sun Yat-Sen and the nationalists in Canton, etc.)

In that case, China announces that when the lease expires in 1997, it will march into the territory that is legally their's. This will happen whether or not Britain has given warning that they do not intend to comply with the Second Convention of Peking, as no nationalist (small 'n') Chinese government would recognise such a move.

Britain can choose to abrogate the treaty unilaterally. It will end... badly.



As @Dan1988 notes, in almost all scenarios the momentum is on China's side- it is Britain who will be risking war, not China, and in those circumstances any confrontation will be even more lopsided towards China than otherwise.
 
Let's play a Choose Your Own Adventure!


NOTE: This assumes a post-1898 POD, as per the last post. If we're going with a formal cession of the New Territories, the initial situation is a little easier- but the basic parameters (run on the stock market as soon as Britain announces it will start a war it can't possibly win, diplomatic isolation as it becomes apparent Britain has no ally in the world with any conceivable reason to support a military confrontation over Hong Kong, no public interest in fighting) will remain the same.

Page 1. You're the British Prime Minister. It's 1997, and you give a speech announcing that you do not recognise the Second Convention of Peking.
You've just announced that you will no longer honor your contracts, so obviously, the first thing that has happened is that the London Stock Market has crashed. Never mind, you've got an indefensible colony with no further strategic or economic use you want to hold on to.

Do you:

A: Announce that you intend to defend Hong Kong with military force, and are calling on your allies to support you? Turn to page two.
B: Announce that you will not recognise Chinese annexation of any territory that was not leased in 1898? Turn to page four.
C: Announce that you have adopted a first-use nuclear weapons policy to defend the city? Turn to page seven

Page Two. Your allies not only don't support you, they have no choice but to publicly condemn what is a violation of international law that threatens the basic principles of state sovereignty and diplomatic treaties. If there's a pre 1898 POD, they can be a little nicer- but no one will want to defend the right of Britain to hold on to a relic of the Opium War, for god's sake.

Those allies who are privately sympathetic will still tell Britain that they will provide no support for the defence of Hong Kong, as it is militarily impossible, economically irresponsible and will be wildly unpopular with democratic populations who will not understand why Britain- Britain, not the PRC- is risking war to stop a Chinese city being Chinese.

Your MPs have seen the military projections, and so have the opposition. Polling shows that the war is massively unpopular with your own public.

You can either surrender the city- go to B: and ending one, or announce that Britain will fight alone.

If so, you face a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. Your minister of defence and foreign secretary resign and cross the floor.

Do you:

A: Fight on! You have a whipping operation like a Dominatrix in a Roman slave galley. You win the vote. Turn to page three.
B: This was a bad idea.
Your government falls. You've reached ending one- you've received a nasty economic shock and your Prime Minister has had to resign, but at least there's no loss of life.

Page Three:

Your garrison has to decide whether or not to try and defend the New Territories.

Do you:

A: Fight? You're immediately overwhelmed, and the PLA overruns your positions and quickly occupies the rest of the City. Turn to page six
B:
Retreat south to the pre-1898 border? Turn to page five.

Page Four:

Your objections are duly noted. Hong Kong falls anyway. You've recieved a severe economic shock, and at the next election the opposition foreign policy platform will be based on the idea that you lost access to a huge market and your failure to negotiate lost any chance to protect any rights for Hong Kong citizens (which would have worked, honest.)

Ending two.

Page five:

Now that the Chinese are in possession of the New Territories, Hong Kong has no water or power supply! You cannot counterattack conventionally.

Do you:

A: Threaten nuclear war? Turn to page seven.
B:
Concede. You've reached ending three- Your prestige has been destroyed, your market has crashed, your government has fallen, you've isolated yourself diplomatically from your allies, you've created a refugee crisis, and you don't have Hong Kong.

Page six:

You've lost Hong Kong! No Royal Navy relief force can get into the South China Sea, as even a PLA that his hypothetically much weaker than OTL can easily sink any transports that arrive.

Do you:

A: Threaten Nuclear war? Turn to page seven.
B:
Concede. Go back to page five and ending three.

Page seven:

You've announced to the world that you are willing to start a nuclear war over a colonial territory that legally belongs to the Chinese. Your strategy is to apparently... what, bomb Beijing and hope for the best?

Do you:

A: Do it. Ending four. Nuclear fire reigns down. Possibly you 'win', in that China doesn't have the range to retaliate. Well done! You're an economic and diplomatic pariah. Economy crashes, government falls, alliances collapse and millions of people have died needlessly. British embassies and business are burned the world over.

B: That's madness! Ending five. Before you can move on from your public posturing, you lose a vote in the House of Commons if your own cabinet doesn't revolt first. Economy crashes, government falls, alliances collapse, massive national trauma. Still, you haven't started a nuclear war, so that's something.
 
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China doesn't need to do anything remotely as belligerent as actually march in, or threaten to do so. All it needs to do is cut the water supply, blockade Hong Kong, etc and Hong Kong rapidly collapses as a marketplace, given it has absolutely no stability or assurance of its future. As a unit separate from China, Hong Kong is literally indefensible.

But nobody wants this because it's a dumb outcome for everyone concerned. Whatever happens, Hong Kong ends up in a shambles which isn't worth having. So as in OTL both sides are naturally drawn to an agreement.
 
The only scenario I can see where China would march in, or as you say threaten to do so, is if Britain publicly announces that there will be no handover in any circumstances. That's only because it would be such a direct challenge to the authority of any government in Beijing (or Nanking or wherever) that it would box China into a corner.
 
Upon reflecting, writing the CYOA may have been an enormously dickish idea.


I'll leave it up since people have seen it and I won't pretend I didn't do it, but I apologise @Venocara- that crossed the line into being a prat.
 
I don't think so. I believe this makes the assumption that no matter what, with a POD in 1898 or in 1945 China will eventually become a superpower or that Britain will definitely lose its superpower status, and I don't think that you can make those assumptions.
The other points have already been addressed, so I'll focus on this one: yes, you can definitely make those assumptions. Now, by "superpower" I guess you mean "great power" because Britain was never a superpower--the word was coined to refer to the uniquely hegemonic status of the USA and USSR after WW2. Moving on, China had previously been a regional power for millennia and the fundamentals of its eventual resurgence (a large population, a resilient culture and a centralized state) still existed. The turn of the 20th century was the heyday of "yellow peril" paranoia because everyone even then understood that China wouldn't remain indefinitely under semi-colonial rule. As for 1945, by that point China had a seat at the UN's Permanent Security Council, which was a formal acknowledgement of its recovered status as a major player, while Britain was exhausted, broke, and in the process of giving independence to its largest colony.

But that's all a moot point, because as previous posters have explained upthread, no sane British government would have threatened war over Hong Kong.
 
I see most people are concentrating on the geopolitical aspects, not the economic ones.

Any politically unified Commonwealth/surviving Empire would be part of the Sterling Area, with Sterling pegged to fixed exchange rates with the US$.

IOTL Britain could not defend the international value of the pound to maintain confidence in the Sterling Area and crucially, neither could any other part of this 'Empire in name only', resulting in a devaluation of sterling against the dollar in 1967, even against Sterling Area currencies — when that occurs (as it inevitably will) any sense of political unity with London will unravel, perhaps disastrously.
 
I think that having a roughly French DOM/TOM style arrangement is a bit awkward, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, other than Malta, I can't see that there all that many that would obviously be willing to stay in the UK, even under a more equitable and less colonial arrangement. Maybe if there's a big and obvious faceplant from a country declaring independence. With what Alex is suggesting plus Malta we've got maybe another 100,000, 200,000 at a stretch, in the 60s. Call it two Maltese constituencies, a Carribean constituency or three depending on who exactly is in (I'm guessing the big players, Jamaica and so on, are still out), maybe a Pacific/Indian ocean constituency. Lets be a bit "optimistic" and keep both Belize and Guyana as an analogy to French Guyana because why not. I think this takes us up to the best part of a million at indepence, and probably about 3 million now (I'm assuming greater immigration into the UK mainland in this case), which is of the same order as France's DOM/TOMs. We're already quite implausible here.

Then we run into a different problem: Hong Kong. I can't see a UK that hangs onto Malta, Belize, Guyana, maybe The Gambia, maybe Mauritius, a bunch of the Carribean, as one that is likely to let Hong Kong go. This UK is likely one that is more able to hang onto Hong Kong and if the former are integrated there would be fairly substantial calls to integrate the latter. Equally, a UK that gives Hong Kong up is likely not going to hang onto the rest of them and we'd be seeing renewed calls for independence at this point as a large chunk of the advantage of being part of the UK is gone - I actually think this is the most likely scenario. But let's say that either the UK is stronger, or China is weaker, or the UK believes sufficiently little in China's ability to take and hold Hong Kong and/or its ability to govern it in a "two systems" style. But we can't have China be too weak or else Hong Kong will be asking for independence rather than union.

Now in 1960 Hong Kong had a population of 3 million, or more than Northern Ireland. Now it's up at over 7 million, higher than any Home Nation besides England. At this point, we have enormously changed the nature of the UK and we've got enormous geopolitical butterflies, not least because it is likely something fairly nasty has gone down in China by this point one way or another (nastier than OTL I mean).

So basically I can see another 200,000 people being added, with maybe another 10 MPs worth, or else we've got a 5th Home Nation, with a 6th made up from the rest (ignore the Frankenstein of a nation that is Malta+Guyana+Belize+Mauritius+a bunch of other smaller islands). We're looking at a UK with a total population upwards of 80 million, where over 10% of MPs would represent "distant" constituencies, give or take a bit with devolved legislations which would obviously be needed. I think that this is an interesting idea but possibly not in the spirit of the OP?

I think the Seychelles would be easier than the Gambia.
 
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