the Legislative Council adopted a motion calling upon the "authorities concerned to take such views fully into account before the promulgation of the Basic Law". By then, the authorities in Beijing had suspended work on the Basic Law on account of the situation in the capital.
it
25. When work on the Basic Law resumed in the autumn, concentrated on the composition of the Legislature and the meetings of the various groups of the BLDC which were concerned produced more open and acrimonious disagreement and stranger proposals than before. For the United Kingdom, the issue was complicated by its programme for increasing the representative character of the colonial Legislative Council in the years prior to the resumption of
[49] Chinese rule and the policy of "convergence"
which had been accepted by both the United Kingdom and China. So far as the Legislature was concerned, "convergence" meant that the composition of the last Legislative Council should be consistent with that of the first Legislature of the SAR. Indirect elections for a number of seats in the Legislative Council had been introduced in 1985, but the introduction of directly elected representatives had been delayed, following unmistakable hints from Chinese spokesmen, until after the promulgation of the Basic Law. (China did not want "to see ...a situation in which the present state of affairs will be greatly changed in the next 12 years"; '... if direct elections are introduced in 1988, before the Basic Law is finished in 1990, of course it will be impossible for the former to converge with the latter" [50] }
A White Paper, published by the Hong Kong Government in 1988 had proposed the introduction in 1991 of 10 elected seats in a
"1
26