On Wednesday, China's National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee issued yet another interpretation of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. This was the third such interpretation since Hong Kong's handover to China in 1997, confirming that autonomy for the Special Administrative Region under the so-called "one country, two systems" model is nothing but a fairy tale.
The two prior interpretations of the Basic Law were made in 1999 and around this time last year. By issuing the first interpretation, the standing committee actually overturned a ruling by the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal that the children of people with Hong Kong residency status were entitled to residency in the Special Administrative Region as well. So, only two years after the handover, Beijing had impatiently seized the opportunity to tell the people of Hong Kong who gets to call the shots.
Then, in April last year, the committee issued the second interpretation of the Basic Law by adding two procedural requirements for revision of the law governing the formation of the Legislative Council. The committee ruled that the three requirements stated in the Basic Law -- approval by at least two-thirds of the Legislative Council members, the chief executive and the NPC Central Standing Committee -- must be preceded by two new procedural requirements: an announcement by the chief executive that an amendment is being sought and a decision by the standing committee to proceed with the revision.
It was Beijing's intention to make it more difficult to change the law governing the formation of the Legislative Council, so as to decrease the risk that the number of democratically elected members on the Legislative Council may be increased as a result. The irony is that it was virtually impossible to amend the law to begin with, as the approval of two-thirds of the Legislative Council's members is required, while only half the members are democratically elected and the rest are puppets appointed by Beijing.
This latest interpretation of the Basic Law by the standing committee states that former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa's (
Issuing interpretations of the Basic Law has become routine for the standing committee. This means that Beijing intends to intervene regularly in the affairs of the Special Administrative Region. Under the circumstances, for anyone to believe that the Special Administrative Region enjoys any realistic autonomy is naive.
If it had been Beijing's intention to use Hong Kong as an example to convince the world that the "one country, two systems" model is a workable solution, it is obviously not working. But Beijing seems less and less worried about its inability to "lure" Taiwan into accepting the "one country, two systems" model through Hong Kong's example. Perhaps this is because Beijing feels increasingly confident about its ability to "impose" the system rather than coaxing acceptance. If that is the case, Taiwan really has something to worry about.
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