British government records, declassified from the National Archives in London in 2014, revealed then foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe proposed on September 6, 1984 that London should accept Beijing’s position that the chief executive could be chosen by “election or consultation”, in return for a statement in the joint declaration that the legislature should be elected.

Former Hong Kong governor David Wilson told the Post in an interview in 2014 that Beijing made a last-minute concession in 1984 to London’s proposal, that the Sino-British Joint Declaration would specify that the post-1997 legislature should be elected.

But those who expected greater democracy have been left disappointed, and universal suffrage still eludes the city.

The anniversary of the signing of the declaration also coincides with the fifth anniversary of student demonstrators storming a forecourt at the government’s headquarters in Admiralty.

That incident triggered the 2014 Occupy protests, which called for greater democracy and nearly brought the city to a standstill.

In June 2015, the Legislative Council rejected the Hong Kong government’s proposal to carry out the 2017 election of the chief executive based on Beijing’s restrictive framework, under which voters could only choose from two or three candidates endorsed by the majority of a 1,200-member nominating committee.

In a message posted on Facebook on September 18 this year, pro-independence group Studentlocalism said the Hong Kong government had “seriously violated” the joint declaration by having failed to implement universal suffrage for electing the chief executive, and the legislature, since the handover.

Beijing tells Britain it has no ‘moral responsibility’ for Hong Kong

The government issued a statement the following day rebutting the group’s claim, and said the accord did not have any paragraph setting out the implementation of “dual universal suffrage”.

In a message posted on his Facebook page on the same day, former chief executive Leung Chun-ying said the claim that “the absence of dual universal suffrage is a violation of the joint declaration” was misleading.

Leung urged the relevant government departments to clarify the fact to those misled by such a claim.

In November 2014, Ni Jian, China’s deputy ambassador to Britain, told Richard Ottaway, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons, that the declaration was “now void and covered only the period from the signing in 1984, until the handover in 1997”.

A month later, Raymond Tam Chi-yuen, Hong Kong’s secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs at the time, said Britain had no right to monitor the implementation of the agreement after 1997.

In July this year, then British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said the agreement remained in effect and was a legally binding one that must be honoured.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing had made “stern representations” over the comments and said Hunt still harboured “colonial illusions”.

The Post’s editorial on September 27, 1984, a day after the draft declaration was signed, said: “Hong Kong people, after digesting the salient points of the draft agreement, will be better able to understand the Zen concept of the sound of one hand clapping. For the wish to applaud the Sino-British agreement is tempered by the uncertainty of whether it will all come to pass.

“One hand will want to clap, but will it make contact? Hongkong people can trust [then China’s paramount leader] Deng Xiaoping. Will his own generation and their successors accept his unique prescription? There is no answer to that question. We are left with but the sound of one hand clapping.”