| 摘 要： | At midnight of June 30, 1997 the Union Jack and the Hong Kong colonial flag over the Hong Kong Conference and Exhibition Center were lowered; at zero hour of July 1, the Chinese national flag and HKSAR regional flag were hoisted. Chris Patten, last governor of Hong Kong, shed tears, saying that night "marked the end of a historical era." Many Hong Kong inhabitants also wept; it was the moment that Hong Kong had awaited for 156 years.Shigekazu Sato, the consul-general of Japan in Hong Kong, recalls how pessimistic the international community was about Hong Kong's future. Many thought that it would lose its dynamism in the process of returning to the motherland. Ten years later, the US Heritage Foundation awarded Hong Kong top spot in its 2007 freedom of trade, freedom of investment, freedom of finance and protection of property rights indexes, and named it number one in its economy freedom index for the 13th successive year.
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