25 Years: Britain's Hong Kong Handover Marked 'Beginning of the End'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : While British Hong Kong once served as a place of refuge for those fleeing communism and repression of mainland China, today, many of the pro-democracy campaigners, who rose to prominence in the Umbrella movement of 2014-15 and the protests against the imposition of Beijing's so-called national security law in 2019-20 have either fled the city or are in jail.
55% : Born on 25 April 1915 in Edinburgh, Cowperthwaite was heavily influenced by fellow Scotsman Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations credited as the "father of capitalism".
49% : Posted in Hong Kong as a civil servant in the Department of Supplies, Trade and Industry in 1945, Cowperthwaite noticed that despite lack of government spending, the city's economy was rebounding on its own naturally once freed of the constraints imposed by the Japanese.
48% : Though the 99 year lease secured under the Second Convention of Peking 1898 only applied to the New Territories, following the admittance of the People's Republic of China (PRC) into the United Nations in 1971, the communist government in Beijing began using the socialist legal theory that all of the UK's holdings in the region were signed during a power imbalance between Imperial China and British Empire and therefore were illegitimate and should be returned to China.
42% : "More should have also been done to establish a mechanism of recourse and enforcement in the event of violations of the Joint Declaration.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.