Protests in Hong Continued today for the 12th week now. Originally the protests started because of a controversial extradition bill that would have allowed China to extradite criminals in Hong Kong to be put on trial in mainland China. The people of Hong Kong feared this was giving the Chinese Communist Party control over Hong Kong’s current judicial independent state. The agreement when Hong Kong was initially reunified with China was that there would be a One country, two systems arrangement which recently has been brought into question with mainland China attempting to slowly impose a stronger influence on Hong Kong.
The Second Convention of Peking was a 99 year lease agreement signed on June 9th of 1898 between China and the United Kingdom. The lease agreement was also known as The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory which would keep British control of the area for the next 99 years. The lease ended on June 30th of 1997 and ended over 150 years of British rule in the area. Since the lease handover, English has remained the official language and is still taught in schools and Hong Kong has continued to operate as a separate territory from mainland China.
Multiple large Corporations have a presence in Hong Kong including
The Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, IBM, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, UBS Bank, KPMG, Deutsche Bank, Deloitte and BNP Paribas. The Chinese approach to the protests along with the ongoing concern of the removal of the One country, two systems arrangement has alarmed some companies and might cause many corporations to remove their business operations from Hong Kong.
