If it was merely the intention of the authors of the Report to leave these questions to be determined by existing law, then it would seem that the certainty which, it is to be hoped, will flow from the reform of Chinese marriage law, will be greatly impaired. This is equally true of the question of affinity or consanguinity as a bar to marriage. Readers of the Strickland Report, 1953, will recall that some confusion existed about the "somewhat difficult subject" (p. 21) of the application of Chinese legal prohibitions on marriages within certain degrees of relationship. The Acting Secretary for Chinese Affairs, in a carefully written Appendix, gave a brief and somewhat superficial account of the traditional law which on principle seems applicable to Chinese Customary Marriages at least in the Colony. Not surprisingly, the Strickland Committee took the view that the prohibitions in the Ch'ing Code, besides being too severe in extent, were so widely disregarded as to be unworkable, an opinion with which the Sub-Committee agrees. However, the Sub-Committee would not agree with the proposal of the Strickland Committee to apply "the present law of China" to the question in Hong Kong if, as was erroneously suggested by that Committee (Strickland Report, p. 46) that law was represented by the Nationalist Civil Code, which is applied nowhere outside Taiwan, a fact apparently not appreciated in 1953. The provisions of that Code are in any event more restrictive than custom would demand: see, for example, M. H. Vander Valk: Conservatism in Modern Chinese Family Law (Studia et Documenta ad Iura Orientis Antiqui Pertinentia, vol. IV, leiden, 1956). The Sub-Committee believes that there would be much to be said for bringing the law of the Colony into line with the law prevailing in China as a whole on this matter if that were feasible, but it appears that the law of the People's Republic has still not arrived at a sufficiently precise definition of affinity to permit rules to be drawn up for Hong Kong which would reflect with assurance the practice in modern China. The Sub-Committee gave some thought to the possibility of appending to the present report a full discussion of the whole problem of affinity, together with detailed recommenda- tions for a table of prohibited relationships based on Chinese tradition, but it would seem that there may be a simpler way of solving the problem. The Sub-Committee would suggest that a
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