HONG KONG, CHINA

This Asian stunner is a beautiful, bustling, behemoth! The night time view across Kowloon bay is incredible, with billions of multi coloured lights peeping through the windows of the city’s hundreds of huge skyscrapers. Almost 300 in fact. Hong Kong has more skyscrapers than any other city in the world, even beating New York.

Victoria peak is the mountain backdrop to the whole beautiful scene, and at 1811 feet (512m) it still looms high above even the tallest of the city’s buildings.
Hong Kong is not an independent country and is part of China.  However it is also not a province.

To understand Hong Kong's status, you need to understand what a Chinese province is.

China is organized in to 4 types of administrative divisions from which the central government devolves power to:
1) Provinces
2) Autonomous regions
3) Directly Governed Municipality
4) Special Administrative Regions ("SAR")

Provinces
The central government maintains full power to makes appointments to the executive branch of the provincial government, and the legislative branch of the provincial government is just a subset of the national legislature rather than a separate body.  The legislature is empowered to make local laws only and have no authority over the appointment of the executive branch.

Note: In theory, the Chinese constitution has separation of power between the executive and the legislature.  However, in practice, the executive drives all lawmaking and the legislature is just a rubber stamp.

Autonomous Regions
Similar to a provinces but theoretically have additional legislative rights that allows the legislature to have more say, especially about how the executive branch is appointed.  Historically these are areas with significant minorities and thus more powers were devolved to satisfy the minority population (i.e. rules that state the governor must be a member of the minority).  However, in practice, because there is no separation of powers between the executive and the legislature in China, any legislative "oversight" is purely theoretical - autonomous regions function in much the same way as Provinces.

Directly Governed Municipalities
These are cities that are so big/important they are treated as provinces: basically Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing.  Like provinces, they have limited legislative authority.

Special Administrative Regions
Under the Chinese constitution, the central government is allowed to create SARs as they deems necessary with special rules.  There are currently 2 SARs - Hong Kong and Macau, both former European colonies and each are govern by a "mini-constitution" known as the Basic Law. 

The Basic Law basically lays out the very extensive powers that the central government have agreed to devolve to Hong Kong and Macau (both the Macau and HK Basic Law are similar but not identical). 

Unlike the provinces, essentially all power, except defense and some areas of foreign policy, is delegated to the local Hong Kong or Macau government.  Even in foreign policy, HK has a high level of autonomy - it maintains its own trade agreements, its own passports, its own sports teams (i.e. as members of FIFA or the Olympic Committee).

Most importantly, both Hong Kong and Macau have a real legislature (about half of which are directly elected) that is not simply a rubber stamp.  The SARs also have their own chief executives/governors that are not directly appointed by the Chinese government and are instead elected locally by a somewhat rigged election process.  By agreeing to devolve these powers to Hong Kong, the central government basically restricted its involvement in the day-to-day running of Hong Kong.

This is why it often seems like Hong Kong is a separate country.  But its important to remember that all of its autonomy is derived from the fact that the central government specifically granted this to Hong Kong under the basic law as part of the reunification process.