ABSTRACT
The run-up to handing over Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1997 drastically radicalized the political scenery of Hong Kong. This last colony of the United Kingdom, situated on the doorstep of the largest socialist state in the world, had been characterized as a borrowed place in borrowed time (Hughes, 1976). However, time was rapidly running out for both the British, who had acquired the territory more than a century before, and for the Hong Kong Chinese, most of whom had come as refugees when the Chinese Communist Party rose to power in China in 1949.
