The following are suggestions only and my personal view may be too optimistic.
Disparity Between the Two Systems Not So Sharpened and could be Diluted to
Something Less than an Opposition in One Country
Today we are opening to the West, and the West is reaching us. We may meet together in
the same direction from different backgrounds. We may mix well and supplement one
another. If there is really no middle way in which socialism circumscribes democracy and
freedom, we are faced with an unattractive marriage. "On the one hand, we are offered the
freedom of the market place with the disruptive influence of democracy suitably confined in
a constitutional straight-jacket; and on the other, the freedom of political participation with
economic liberty banished as a bourgeois conceit." As the Chinese proverb runs, "Things
that oppose each other also complement each other." We might share life together and
depend on each other.
1.
Taking the "literary" view of the instruments, there are no inconsistencies in their
broad declarations of substantive rights in the Bill of Rights and Chapter III of the Basic Law,
Fundamental Rights and Duties of the Residents, Articles 8, 39 and 152 of the Basic Law
successively suggest themselves:
"The laws previously in force in Hong Kong, that is, the common law, rules of equity,
ordinances, subordinate legislation and customary law shall be maintained except for any that
contravene this Law, and subject to any amendment by the legislature of the Hong Kong
4