CODE RAD
Mr
cox
HKD
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kec Miss Saunders, My Bradley (DPA, HII(-)
tothers who rec'd premous pp Reference.
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2. MN Bunkenly
Some interesting points here.
I continue to feel we cd gain tactical advantage by pretending to take the NPC
HKC 024/1
визира 25/1..
seriously & raining the question with the Chinese. Await feling comments?
HONG KONG DEPUTIES TO THE NPC AND CPPCC
2stii
см ais
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The
1. I have seen Mr Bradley's letter of 11 February to you on this subject. He asks whether the SAR LegCo will equate to a provincial People's Congress. It is always difficult to find consistency in Chinese pronouncements and legal documents on such subjects. whole question of the relationship betwen the Basic Law and the Chinese Constitution is discussed at some length in Chapter 4 of the book I have been translating. This shows that there are are clear inconsistencies between the Basic Law and the Constitution but in the end, in the Chinese view, this does not matter too much as long as the practical arrangements work.
2.
I would guess from the material available that the Chinese would not seek to treat the Hong Kong SAR Legco in exactly the same way as a provincial People's Congress. One of the points of having a Basic Law at all is to provide for a legislature that is not a People's Congress (which is the system used on the rest of the mainland). There are numerous differences between the two (eg in the scope of the their legislative power, the powers of disallowance exercised by the NPC over thier legislation and so on). All of this relates obviously to the "high level of autonomy" to be enjoyed by the Hong Kong SAR. The SAR LegCo would certainly not wish to be seen and treated exactly like a provincial People's Congress. On the other hand, the Hong Kong SAR is in some ways parallel to a province, in that it will be directly subordinate to the centre and will have no intervening layer of administration. In this it is similar to the major municipalities of Peking, Shanghai and Tianjin which are also directly subordinate to the centre and equivalent in every way to a province.
3. This must have consequences for the election of NPC deputies. Under the system I described in my minute, Hong Kong deputies form part of the Guangdong provincial delegation and are elected by the Guangdong provincial People's Congress. So long as Hong Kong was not a part of China, since the Chinese clearly wanted Hong Kong delegates to the NPC, administrative convenience presumably dictated that the Chinese follow the historical precendent of treating Hong Kong as part of Guangdong (as indeed it was throughout the Chinese system). There was also the considerable legal and technical problem of how to conduct proper elections in Hong Kong for deputies to a body which theoretically exercises the supreme state power in China. The quirks of the Chinese electoral system allow NPC deputies to be elected at provincial Congresses and they need not have been through any electoral process lower down the system. There is thus no need for the Chinese to conduct elections in Hong Kong to find deputies to the NPC. After 1997, there is no way in which it could easily be argued that that system should continue since there would be no formal relationship of subordination between the Hong Kong SAR and Guangdong province. Hong Kong, as an administrative unit directly subordinate to the centre, would clearly be on a par with a province such as Guangdong in terms of its relationship to the centre. It would expect to elect and send its own delegates to the NPC (and CPPCC) and not
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