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contained in a China News Service despatch which was published in Wen Wei Po on 3 January. Mr. Hu said, while the open policy was beneficial to China in many aspects, it also brought in germs. Hence, China must be firm in implementing the open policy and yet it must try to resist the corrupt thinking and lifestyle of capitalism. He said there were two kinds of "sugar-coated" cannonballs which corrupted Chinese people. Materially they were money, women and exotic goods. Spiritually, the corrupt thinking of capitalism in the form of art and lifestyle was also eroding the Chinese people. Mr. Hu also urged the news media in China to refrain from publishing reports relating to the worshipping of western lifestyle and illusory things.
China's new Constitution an improvement?: The Chinese Opinion column by Chang Kuo-sin in the Standard of 5 January again dealt with China's new Constitution. It said China had made four Constitutions and Beijing had said the latest was the most perfect. On close examination it was a simple matter of putting two and two together to come to the conclusion that China's new Constitution was as imperfect as its three predecessors and most likely to be just as unworkable. In the communist system of government, constitutions were never seriously meant to be workable, or respected and implemented for that matter. It must however be conceded that the new Constitution, if not more perfect, was in some ways an improvement over its predecessors. It had, for one thing, removed many oddities established in the previous constitutions - at least on paper such as subordinating the State to the Party; providing for a State without a Head of State; and making the Party Chairman ex-officio Commander-in-Chief in the country's armed forces.
Letters in the Asian Wall Street Journal: Recently, the AWSJ published an interview
with prominent HK businessman, Mr. R.C. Lee, in response to which Patrick Wye of Hong Kong wrote to the paper saying any change of ownership brought about a change in management and administrative objectives and there were numerous basic economic changes that would inevitably arise from a change of the ownership of HK. In response to another article by a Chase Manhattan Bank area economist, which highlighted the 10 main ingredients for HK's success (see last week's summary), Mr. Wye said how many of these ingredients might be changed was not pursued, but even the optimistic Mr. R.C. Lee suggested that HK would change from being a speculative market to an investment market with the introduction of capital gains tax. Such a change in itself would alter the characteristic of HK. Trevor Littlejohn of Kowloon City said perhaps Mr. Lee did not live in China during the communist takeover and so did not hear their promises to have peace and prosperity and plenty throughout the land after the takeover. It all sounded so familiar again now. Writing about Mr. Sharpe's article, Frankie Leung said he could have mistaken Mr. Sharpe for Milton Friedman. What seemed more fundamental to the 10 main ingredients was the existence of a HK ethic; to possess such a trait, one did not have to be Chinese nor successful. China must be aware of the tremendous drive and dynamism in the HK people and to preserve HK and make it a success the HK ethic must stay. It was the people who manned the institutions.
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