It required a defeated China to lease Hong Kong to Britain and grant “extraterritoriality,” which meant that British citizens would be subject to British law, not Chinese. A whole series of subsequent “unequal treaties” over the nineteenth century gave European nations, including Russia, as well as Japan, preferential commercial and extraterritorial legal rights in Chinese coastal cities, along with political control within defined concession areas. All this undermined China’s sovereignty and heralded its weakness. A climax of the “humiliation” came in 1919, when the Versailles treaty awarded
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