The Hong Kong Basic Law and the Limits of Democratization under 'One Country Two Systems'

Abstract

The Development of Hong Kong's Political System: From Colony to Special Administrative Region The British colony of Hong Kong was created and subsequently expanded by three treaties between the Qing Empire in China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century.2 The last of the three treaties provided for a ninety-nine-year lease by the Qing Dynasty to Britain of the 'New Territories' (north of Kowloon Peninsula and Hong Kong Island, which were ceded to Britain by virtue of the first two treaties) in the midst of the foreign powers' 'scramble for concessions in China' in 1898.3 As the lease would expire in 1997, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher raised the question of Hong Kong's post-1997 constitutional status before PRC leaders when she visited Beijing in 1982. The existing laws of Hong Kong would remain basically unchanged; civil liberties, human rights and private property rights would continue to be respected and protected. The Basic Law is sometimes called Hong Kong's 'mini-constitution': it is a constitutional instrument providing for what legal, political, economic and social systems the HKSAR should practice under the framework of OCTS.8 Although the British had transplanted to colonial Hong Kong its common law and its tradition of the Rule of Law, the British style of parliamentary democracy or the 'Westminster-style' government was never exported to the colony of Hong Kong, which was governed by Governors appointed direcdy by London until 1997.° Before democratization began in the mid1980s, the political system of Hong Kong had been described as an...