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| Politics & Policy |
The Contracts that China Forgot
Kin-ming Liu
05/03/2004
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American business leaders intent on securing a slice of the vast Chinese
market should pay close attention to what is happening in Hong Kong to see how
China treats legally binding contracts. Relations between Hong Kong and Beijing
have reached a low point in the past year. Last July more than 500,000 Hong Kong
residents took to the streets to protest antisubversion legislation. It was the
largest demonstration here since over a million people marched to condemn the
Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
| On January 1, 100,000 people marched in protest, demanding full
democracy. |
The current row began over the apparent
unwillingness of the Chinese government to honor the terms of the
mini-constitution it drafted as the basis for the 1997 handover, when Hong Kong
ceased to be a British colony and became a Special Administrative Region of the
People’s Republic of China.
The document, known as the Basic Law, states
that direct elections of the chief executive and the legislature can take place
as early as 2007 and 2008, respectively, if Hong Kong’s legislature, the chief
executive and China’s National People’s Congress all agree. While China has
stacked the deck with appointees who seem unlikely to support direct elections,
Articles 45 and 68 of the Basic Law state that its ultimate aim is the selection
of the chief executive and members of the legislature by universal suffrage.
However, Beijing now claims that it will have the final say in the election of
both the chief executive and the Legislative Council.
At the same time,
according to another legally binding document, the Sino-British Joint
Declaration, signed in 1984, Beijing made a number of promises under the “One
Country, Two Systems” formula that then-Premier Deng Xiao Ping designed: Hong
Kong could enjoy a high degree of autonomy with “Hong Kong people running Hong
Kong” and keep its current system and ways of living unchanged for 50 years
after Britain surrendered its last colony to the world’s largest dictatorship.
The people of Hong Kong, interpreting these terms to mean that they can run
their own system, have been demanding the right to elect their leaders. On
January 1, 100,000 people marched in a protest, demanding full democracy.
Beijing, however, says no, and insists that the Hong Kong Chinese have to be
“patriotic.”
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