"American opposition to the continued British occupation of Hong Kong as a colony after the end of the Second World War serves as an ironic backdrop to the growth of American involvement in the territory thereafter. Franklin Roosevelt had insisted during the course of the war that the phenomenon of colonialism would have to end and promised Madame Chiang Kai-s.hek that Hong Kong would be restored to Chinese control. However, the combination of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's obduracy on the subject and the Chinese civil war invalidated such guarantees, and British troops retrieved the colony without resistance. Almost immediately, Washington discovered that having London in charge conferred significant economic and political benefits on American merchants, soldiers and spies." (1)
Even some American diplomats, in the 1960s, came to think in terms of Hong Kong as an "American colony" rather than a "British colony."
Neal Donnelly, formerly a high school teacher in Buffalo, New York, was a rare American phenomenon, a diplomat who could speak Mandarin and Cantonese fluently. A longtime U.S. Information Agency officer in Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong (as well as being chief for several years of the Voice of America China branch in Washington D.C.), Donnelly told me that to him Hong Kong seemed more American than British, partly because of the Vietnam War era traffic of ships and military personnel through Hong Kong. Although it was against U.S. regulations, many wives of American pilots, army and naval officers set up residence in Hong Kong to be near their spouses during schedule leave.
There have been various U.S. Congressional attempts to legislate some American watchdog status over Hong Kong, similar to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, but these have faltered because the U.S. has no specific security leverage in Hong Kong.
Continued presence of Americans (nearly 30,000), an American Chamber of Commerce that rivals the Tokyo American Chamber in membership numbers if not business clout, some 1,200 American businesses with affiliations, employing 250,000 workers, including 198 regional headquarters and nearly US$15 billion in investments means that there will be continued American attention on issues like freedom of the press.
The tale was making the rounds in the 1960s that Hong Kong was so overloaded with intelligence listening devices that if one more electronic snoop were to be added, the island would sink into the South China Sea.
The fears, if they were legitimate and not apocryphal, were proved empty by the literally millions of mobile phones, beepers and pagers - not to mention computers--added in later years.
