China is Erasing its Border with Hong Kong

The people of Hong Kong are out in the streets. It's about the status of Hong Kong and the power China has over it. It's a fight to preserve the freedoms people have there. They are not doing this for themselves, but for the future of Hong Kong. So this is bringing up a lot of questions of what is Hong Kong? Who does it really belong to? And what happens when you erase a border?

How did this situation start in the first place?

It all began in the late 1800s, when China lost a series of wars to Britain due to opium trade. Britain eventually ceding Hong Kong in 1842 as a colony for 99 years, this was a mainly empty rocky, group of island in southern China. Under British rule, Hong Kong's population and economy exploded, and even though Hong Kong's population was mainly made up of immigrants from China, it became a very different society than mainland China which was undergoing a communist revolution. One of the treaties that China and Britain signed that Hong Kong would be a British colony for 99 years, which meant that the agreement would officially expire in 1997.

In the mid 1980s, the leaders from China and Great Britain negotiated the terms of handing Hong Kong to China. Deng Xiaoping "Communist Party Leader" and Margaret Thatcher "British Prime Minister" came to an agreement that Britain would give over Hong Kong under agreement terms that Hong Kong would be able to retain its way of life, legal system, their economic system, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of association, freedom of religious worship, these are fundamental freedoms. China agreed they said they would let them be Chinese rule. 50 years beyond 1997. And so this was an agreement that they came to which was called "One Country,Two Systems".