6. There is no provision in the Basic Law which reflects
the Joint Declaration's statement that the SAR shall
"decide its economic... policies on its own". The
consequences of this omission are considered in Section
VI below.
7.
There was also a factual prior question, namely
to what geographical area would the Basic Law apply?
A Decision of the NPC adopted on 4th April 1990 states
that the SAR "covers the Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon
Peninsular, and the islands and adjacent waters under its jurisdiction." That begs the question of which
islands and which waters are under the SAR's jurisdiction,
and it is significant because there is room for disagreement
with regard to the present maritime boundaries of Hong
Kong. The NPC Decision states that a map of the SAR
will be published separately. None had been published
at the time this article was written.
8. In introducing the draft constitution in the NPC,
Peng Zhen, Vice-Chairman of the Committee for Revision
of the Constitution, referred to Article 31 and the
reunification of Taiwan which could enjoy "a high degree
of autonomy as a special administrative region" and
noted that such policies were appropriate "in handling problems of a similar kind": Documents of the Fifth Session of the Fifth NPC, Foreign Language Press Beijing, p 100.
9 For example, one of the Chinese legal experts on the BLDC was reported in the newspaper Sing Pao on 3rd
September 1987 as believing that "there would be a need
to either amend or insert an annex to article 31 of the
Constitution before 1997 in order to ensure that the
article would be more comprehensive and more capable of providing for the setting up of the SAR".
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