Everything from Hong Kong, Daewoo in Madagascar, to housing in Singapore. Why exactly 99?
In: Economics
We can explain this law! A long time ago in England, there was a problem. When really rich people died, they would leave their land to their families, but put all sorts of weird rules in the wills. Sometimes these were rules about how you could use the land – maybe you couldn’t build new houses or structures. That meant that hundreds of years later, when they invented electric power, you might not be allowed to get electricity in the house, even though it hadn’t even been thought of when the will was written! Even worse, some of the wills had rules about who got the land later on: rules like “if the person who owns the land dies, their oldest son gets it. If they don’t have any sons, their oldest brother gets it. If they don’t have any brothers either,…” And these rules got really mean! If someone had only daughters, when they died the land and the house and all the money might be given to some distant cousins, and their own kids would be thrown out with nothing. And because of the way the laws worked, there was nothing anybody could do: once someone wrote a rule down in a will or a lease, it was the rule _forever._
People finally got really sick of this, so they made a new law, called the “rule against perpetuities.” It basically said that any contract, or will, or anything like that automatically stopped working after 100 years. That way, you could still make wacky rules with your things if you wanted, but you couldn’t make them the law for all time. Other people would always get a chance to make _their_ wacky rules.
That’s why people started making leases for 99 years. Other countries thought the law was a good idea, so they copied it, and it became common all over. It’s not as strict nowadays, but it’s still there.
The reason they wanted really long leases is because of another funny thing about England: most people who own their own houses don’t own the land under their houses. Instead, they have to _rent_ that land from someone – usually a powerful aristocrat – and pay them every month. It’s sort of like an extra tax everyone has to pay to the nobles. But if you build a house, you don’t want to lose the lease on the land five years later – what would you do then? You can’t just pack up the house itself and move it! But the nobles didn’t want to just sell people the land either, because that’s how they got most of their money. So instead, they would make leases for a really long time – and even today, most houses in England sit on top of 99-year land leases and weird things happen when they come up.
Hong Kong is a story sort of like that: the UK didn’t want to say “this is our land now and we’re keeping it” for all sorts of reasons, so they said “you’re going to lease us this land or else.” And so China “leased” it to them for 99 years, since that’s the longest lease allowed. And when it expired, China took over again, but it was complicated because the Chinese government was very different from the one that was in China when this lease started – and a lot of people in Hong Kong were scared that the new government would be very mean to them, because Hong Kongers had become different during those 99 years – for example, they liked to argue about politics, something which you’re not allowed to do like that in China. So the Chinese government promised that they’d let Hong Kong keep their rules for another fifty years, even after they became part of China, but then they started to break their promise. That’s what the protests in Hong Kong right now are all about.
Latest Answers