[av_engr]

Agree on the part about China threatening since the 60s. If I recall correctly, there was a wave of movement on British Colonies raising referendum on independence from Britain since the 60s ? Hong Kong did not earn that right due to Communist China's threat on "liberating" Hong Kong if it was given independence.

[Normille]

Can you cite any documentary evidence for these Chinese threats, dating back to the 1960s?

I'm not saying you're wrong but China in the 1960s was an unindustrialised, agrarian 3rd-world country which was barely able to feed its own people. I suspect Britain [a rich, industrialised, nuclear-armed member of NATO] would have laughed in their face, if China had issued any threats.

We shouldn't fall into the trap of looking at the might & modernity of China today and thinking t'was ever thus. I'm old enough to remember when news footage from China would show countless thousands of people, clad in denim boiler suits, riding bicycles through Peking, with nary a car to be seen.

[ASIDE: Ironic that moving towards vehicle-free cities with a cycling populace is now seen as aspirational and a sign of progress whereas, back then, it was an indicator of how backward China was]

[mannykannot]

Go to the post I linked to for more evidence.

Furthermore, remember that it was China's intervention in Korea in the early 1950s that almost overran the US forces in Korea, and forced a negotiated settlement with the creation of two Koreas.

NATO is irrelevant, as that was an alliance for the defence of Western Europe, not small remnants of Britain's colonies. NATO was not about to go to war with China then, any more than it involved itself in Korea.

And what would Britain do with its nukes? Nothing more than the US did in Korea and Viet Nam. If Britain were to even threaten their use, it would seriously damage its relationship with the USA, by creating a precedent that the USSR (and, by 1964, a nuclear China) could invoke at any time. Remember what happened over Suez, which did not even go as far as a nuclear threat.

Even if Britain halted an initial invasion, China would still be there, on the border of Hong Kong, for as long as the British could afford to stay (or until 1997, if it came to that, which it would not.)

None of this analysis is dependent on "looking at the might & modernity of China today and thinking t'was ever thus."

[av_engr]

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/asia/china-began-pu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_independence#Colonia...

In the 60s/70s China was in bad terms with Soviet, US/UK saw the benefit of having China as "Allies". Thus, HK kind of became the scapegoat.