Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher (13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, the first woman to hold the office and one of the longest continuously serving elected heads of government in the twentieth-century Western world.

Her most significant engagement with China centred on the negotiations over Hong Kong's future. In September 1982 she visited Beijing and met Deng Xiaoping, seeking an agreement on the basis of exchanging sovereignty for administration — whereby Britain would acknowledge Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong in return for continuing British governance — but was firmly rebuffed. Beijing insisted that sovereignty and administration were inseparable and made clear that it would resume control of Hong Kong when the lease expired in 1997. Faced with this reality, the Thatcher government conducted two years of negotiations and on 19 December 1984 signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing, agreeing to transfer sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997 in exchange for China's commitment to maintain Hong Kong's capitalist system and a high degree of autonomy for fifty years under the 'one country, two systems' framework.