1997
Hong Kong returned to China
At midnight in pouring Victoria Harbor rain, the Union Jack came down and the red banner of the People's Republic went up over Hong Kong. One hundred fifty-six years of British rule ended. Beijing promised one country, two systems, for fifty years. The promise would hold for a little less than half that time.
Asian financial crisis
Thailand's central bank, out of reserves, let the baht float. It plunged. Within months the crisis had spread through Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines, triggering mass layoffs, toppled governments, and IMF austerity. The East Asian miracle suddenly looked like a bubble. Globalization had discovered its first major crisis.
Princess Diana dies
Fleeing paparazzi on motorcycles, a Mercedes driven by a drunk chauffeur crashed in a Paris tunnel at high speed. Diana, the thirty-six-year-old Princess of Wales, died in a Paris hospital before dawn. Her funeral drew a global television audience of over two billion. A new, public kind of celebrity mourning had been invented.
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
IBM's chess computer Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a full six-game match. It was the first time a machine had beaten a reigning world champion under tournament conditions. Kasparov accused IBM of cheating. He later wrote that he had felt the computer thinking. Machines had found their first throne.
Mars Pathfinder lands
On the Fourth of July, NASA's Pathfinder bounced down onto the red plains of Ares Vallis in a cluster of airbags. Its little rover Sojourner, the size of a microwave, trundled off to sniff rocks. Pictures came back by evening. A generation that had grown up with Viking grew up again, and Mars felt close.
Kasparov loses to Deep Blue
Chess world champion Garry Kasparov lost a full six-game match to IBM's Deep Blue, two to one with three draws. It was the first time a computer had beaten a world champion at classical time controls. Kasparov, shaken, accused IBM of cheating. A symbolic threshold in the relationship between humans and machines had been crossed in Manhattan.
Kyoto Protocol signed
After two weeks of bitter negotiation in the Japanese old capital, thirty-seven industrialized nations agreed to binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The US Senate refused to ratify. China and India were exempted as developing countries. The protocol would do little to slow emissions but entered climate change as a policy issue the world was now officially discussing.