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During the week, a senior researcher of international affairs in China said modernisation, reunification with Taiwan and regaining sovereignty over HK were the three most important missions for the nation. The accomplishment of these missions would usher China into the 21th century. He envisaged that China would also regain sovereignty over Macau when conditions were ripe.
Later, a China News Service despatch from Beijing quoted the managing director of Everbright Co., Wang Guangying, as saying the company's objective was to contribute to HK's prosperity as well as to China's economy. The privately-owned company extended its business to HK because it believed the world recession was bottoming out and China's economic development had been stepped up. He intended to attract staff from multi- national corporations to work for his company in HK.
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PRESS LINES:
Ming Pao and the HK Economic Journal put forward some arguments to dispute China's self-rule proposition. Commenting on Beijing's definition of "HK people” as reported by the academics who visited China early this month, Ming Pao said this showed that Beijing's yardstick for defining citizenship was totally different from that of many other countries. In Britain and the US, for example, citizens were not considered unpatriotic and were not deprived of their political rights simply because they did not subscribe to the ruling party's line. The candid statement from the Chinese leadership in defining HK people also showed that many people in HK, including the academics, were wrong and foolish in their attempts to equate the political thinking of communism with the logic prevailing in a western country. The political concepts of communists were completely different from those in a democratic nation.
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The Hong Kong Economic Journal said whether China's "self-rule" proposition for HK was successful or not it would have a major political bearing in China and would do nothing but harm to HK. If the "self-rule" proposal failed Beijing would come up with another formula for HK. But, then, both China and HK would suffer great losses. On the other hand, if it proved successful, Beijing might either adopt HK's model to develop its own economy, or seek to change the territory's system gradually in a bid to prevent it drifting further away from Marxism.
In another editorial, the paper envisaged that more foreign investment would flow into HK despite the 1997 question with local industrialists trying to enter into joint ventures with foreign interests to minimise the political risk, while at the same time foreign investors would be attracted by the drop in the value of the HK dollar since last year.
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