When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.

I'm interested in how the takeover happened on the inside. How do you take control of a country with minimal drama when even small corporate takeovers get so messy? I assume there's been a lot of work to root out internal dissent, install aligned individuals, take control of computer systems. Even though the UK handed HK to China, there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.