Question

写香港的英语作文

Answer 1

Hong Kong is 98% Chinese. Although the territory's official languages are English and Cantonese, the use of Mandarin (or Putonghua), China's official language, is on the rise. Among the non-Chinese living in Hong Kong, some 150,000 Filipinos make up the largest foreign community; most are women working as maids and nannies (amahs in local parlance), and can be seen socializing in Statue Square on their day off, usually Sunday.

Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997. The British owned Hong Kong Island, but the New Territories -- the part of Hong Kong on the mainland -- had been leased from China in 1898. It was the expiration of this 99-year lease that necessitated Britain's handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

In hindsight, the handover looks anticlimactic. The rest of the world was always more apprehensive about Chinese rule than were most Hong Kongers, for whom business takes precedence over all other issues. It was the Asian crisis, which hit within a month of the handover, that became the real news of 1997 and the years that followed.

The SAR (Special Administrative Region) government pulled through the crisis, and today it is easy to forget the economy was ever imperiled. The changes wrought by the handover are mostly ones of increasing integration between the local and mainland economies, a process that has been under way for at least two decades.

Perhaps the greatest sign that Hong Kong is operating comfortably under Chinese rule is the fact that political debate has, for the most part, centered on such issues as chickens and pollution rather than the much-feared crackdown on individual liberty. The local press, though subject to some self-censorship, still thrives; international reporting, publishing, and broadcasting continue unabated. And most everyone makes time to check up on the stock market.