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CHINA'S BASIC LAW FOR HONG KONG
I: INTRODUCTION
1 July 1991
1. The colony of Hong Kong consists of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, the New Territories and a number of small islands. Hong Kong Island and part of Kowloon (and Stonecutters Island) were ceded to the United Kingdom by China in 1842 and 1860; the New Territories and other islands were leased to the United Kingdom in 1898 for a period of ninety- nine years, which will expire in 1997. The leased territories comprise some ninety-two per cent of the land of the colony and, in the early 1980s, the British Government came to the conclusion that, when the lease came to an end, the remainder of the colony would not be viable as a separate entity. They, accordingly, entered into negotiations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the question of the future of the whole territory of Hong Kong. The result of the negotiation was the Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong which was signed on 19th December 1984 and ratified in the following year [1]
1A The Joint Declaration provides for China to resume the exercise of sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong in 1997 and sets out the "basic policies" which the Government of the PRC propose to adopt in regard to it. On the 4th April 1990, the National People's Congress, the principal legislative organ of the PRC, adopted the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region which is designed to give effect to those "basic policies". The Basic Law will come into operation on 1st July 1997.
2.
[2]
Unlike the Joint Declaration, which was the product of a diplomatic negotiation and in which both parties shared the drafting, the drafting of the Basic Law was a matter for the Chinese [3]
The task was committed to a Basic
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