You have entirely misunderstood Hong Kong's situation. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were actually ceded 100% to the British Empire... Only the New Territories were on the 99-year lease. Hong Kong is part of China NOW... but it wasn't always part of China.

The quickest answer is that some countries fsck with the websites of others... I live in China and they love to play games with DNS resolving, temporary and permanent website bans, bandwidth restrictions (sometimes per service... ie just for www, but ssh is full speed).... and etcetera and so forth.

Sometimes you will download from another site just so it doesn't take a week to download, sometimes you don't even realize that you are on a China specific site that is giving you different binaries (ie Skype).

I pissed myself when I saw this was labelled troll. Mod this one up. If ever there was a topic where we needed a couple +5 Troll posts, this would be it.