Description
This paper is an exploration of why the British conceded all control of Hong Kong’s post-1997 administration during the fifth round of Sino-British negotiations after months of resistance. One of the few ways in which International Relations scholarship has addressed the Hong Kong case using a theoretical framework is through treating the Sino-British negotiations as a contest of brinksmanship that can be analysed as a Game of Chicken. Following the logic of Chicken, the timing of British concession can be understood as the only logical response to avoiding an approaching crash point which British policymakers defined as a negotiating breakdown. On the surface, this application of Chicken is apt, but predicated on the British coming to perceive, at a particular time, a crash point dependent on a series of intangible assumptions, leaps of logic, and psychological expectations regarding the behaviour of Hong Kong’s population. This paper therefore addresses why British policymakers came to perceive a crash point at the point in time they did. In doing so, it also makes an important empirical contribution to study of the Hong Kong negotiations, utilising hitherto underused British archival sources declassified in 2013. By tracing the processes of British policymaking and negotiating strategy during the negotiations’ early stages, this paper elucidates and builds theory addressing the important but understudied issue of how crash points come to be perceived by actors in contests of brinksmanship. Through inductively considering how crash points generally come to be perceived during contests of brinksmanship, I propose a tripartite framework of preconditions which need to be met for actors to perceive a crash point under Game of Chicken logic. I then hypothesise how each of these preconditions can be met in empirical situations where the perceived crash is framed intangibly and based on assumptions, rather than tangible and straightforward cause-effect relationships. I further argue that it is the intangibility of a perceived crash point which opens possibilities for individual crash point ‘advocates’ and ‘detractors’ to use extreme framings and rhetorical tools such as hyperbole and embellishment for advocating or contesting the perception of a crash point. Through this generalisable analytical and interpretive framework, I was able to make sense of the Hong Kong case and identify a key explanatory variable for why the British came to perceive a crash point when they did.
