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person. During the meeting, Mr. Louis CHA Leung-yung opined that a new compromising proposal would be raised in the meeting of the political sub-group and that this proposal would be very conservative. He also explained that if it was not so, the Chinese authority would not accept it. The proposal was only submitted to the Basic Law Drafters of Hong Kong on the afternoon of 16 November and those Basic Law Drafters who had gone to attend the meeting in Guangzhou only received it on the 17. When Mr. Louis CHA Leung-yung and the others arrived in Guangzhou at about 6.00 p.m. on the 18, he still tried to promote his proposal to the reporters. After dinner, a 'preparatory meeting' was held between Mr. CHA and 4 Chinese officials who were also Basic Law Drafters, including Li Hou, Lu Ping, XIAO Wei-yan and MAO Jun-nian.
When Mr. CHA met the reporters about 11.00 p.m. that night, he modified his previous remarks and said that his original proposal had been distributed to some of the Basic Law Drafters on the 15 and then he had made certain amendments to the proposal after discussing it with various members of the political sub-group and collecting a lot of suggestions from them. However, as a matter of fact, among more than 10 members of the political sub-group, at least 4 of those representing Hong Kong had not been consulted by Mr. CHA before he amended the first draft of the proposal. It was only before the meeting on the 19 that the second draft, which incorporated the amendments made by Mr. CHA overnight, was given to various members by the staff of the Secretariat. One of the members representing Hong Kong objected to the fact that the proposal of Mr. CHA be adopted as the basis for discussion and suggested that half a day or one day should be spent on discussing the views of Hong Kong people collected during the five-month consultation period first. However, his suggestion was not accepted by members at the meeting. His main reasons for objection were that the pace of development of the political system proposed in the second draft was hastened by more than 10 years when compared with that in the first draft and that the 3 phases of development had been changed to 2 phases of development. Finally, the political sub-group used the new proposal put forward by Mr. CHA as the basis for discussion without casting of votes beforehand and the proposal was subsequently adopted by the majority and became the 'mainstream proposal.
Tables 1 and 2 show the differences between the two proposals in respect of the Chief Executive. Nevertheless, in the decision-making process mentioned above, the following major questions were revealed:
(1) Mr. CHA has been living in Hong Kong for a long time and before the meeting, he had met and discussed the matter with members of groups supporting other proposals. Therefore he should understand the essence of various proposals on the political system.
(lb) Then why was the speed of development of the 3 phases listed in the first draft (See Table 1) lower than that advocated in various major proposals?
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(2) Just when Mr. CHA arrived in Guangzhou on the night of the 18, he was still trying to promote the first draft of the proposal. Why did he hastily amend the first draft just after a few hours' discussion with a few Basic Law drafters of the Chinese authority and produced a new draft overnight? (3) As no consultation has been carried out on the proposal of Mr. CHA in Hong Kong and the results of the consultation on the Draft Basic Law has not been used as the basis for discussion, then on what grounds did the members of the BLDC's political sub-group determine to support the proposal?
After the publication of the mainstream proposal, 9 organisations amended the recommendations previously made by them on the political system. A comparison is provided in Tables 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the recommendations made by various groups on the forms of indirect election of the Chief Executive, the mechanism and time limit for the transition to the selection of the Chief Executive by general election, and the generally elected elements in the first and second term of the Legislature.
Among the recommendations made by various groups on the forms of indirect election of the Chief Executive (See Table 3), the 'mainstream proposal' is the one which basically adopts the method of Grand Electoral College. There are two main characteristics in this kind of electoral college:
(1) The majority (75%) of its members shall be elected by functional bodies or selected by consultation. With regard to these two methods, the election by functional bodies is a form of limited franchise and the procedure and method of selection by consultation is even more unpredictable.
(2) The remaining 25% of its members shall be constituted of serving members of councils at various levels elected by the public through general election. In fact, under this method, two times of indirect election have been held to produce a Chief Executive. Firstly, the voter has to elect a representative in his district (by general election). Then among these some 500 members of councils at various levels, 100 members shall be elected to join the electoral college. (The nature of indirect election has been mentioned above). After that, these 100 members shall cast votes to elect the Chief Executive. Therefore this method for electing the Chief Executive cannot be regarded as containing any generally elected elements. In fact, it means an indirect election out of another indirect election, not to mention that only 25% of the members are elected this way. All in all, this kind of electoral college provides no chance for the public to select the Chief Executive by direct election. Comparatively this method, without violating the major premise of not allowing the general public to select the Chief Executive, is a form of compromise out of all such proposals suggesting the establishment of an electoral college, a candidate-nominating college or an election commission. The mainstream proposal takes no account of the two other proposals which are of a totally different nature, i.e., the proposals of the Group of 190 and the Federation of Hong Kong and Kowloon Labour Unions. The point in common contained in these 2 proposals is that the