 Besides funding the conservative Chinese cultural institutions such as the New Asia College and the Yale-China Association, the United States also encouraged and took advantage of the anti-Communist activities of the Kuomintang.During the 1950s, the Third Force was created by the Central Intelligence Agency as an anti-communist movement of Chinese, which posed a problem for the British authorities, who although ideologically aligned with the United States to keep Hong Kong non-Communist, had officially recognised the Chinese Communist regime in 1950 and were highly sensitive about provoking Beijing.As the Sino-British negotiation for the Hong Kong sovereignty after 1997 began in the early 1980s, the business elites sought the way to maintain the "status quo" of Hong Kong.