TNAG-0189-FCO40-225-Chinese-marriages-in-Hong-Kong-1969 — Page 67

assumption with which the Sub-Committee would emphatically disagree, for the reasons advanced above in paras. 14-17), there could scarcely be any doubt as to the necessity of incorporating into such legislation the age-old Chinese practice of divorce by consent. In a predominantly Chinese community such as that of Hong Kong, the burden would be very much on those who would seek to impose the concept of matrimonial offence as the principal or sole basis for divorce on Chinese marriages - a concept which is almost entirely the creature of Christian social and legal teaching on the sacramental character of marriage, and which is not necessarily at all applicable to a non-Christian society. To try to impose such a doctrine would be to disregard fundamental principles of Chinese social thought, particularly at a time when the concept of matrimonial offences seem on the point of being abandoned in English law.

63. The Sub-Committee has already pressed the point that the creation of different classes of marriage by legislation would be highly undesirable, particularly along the lines of racial divisions, and it has recorded its opinion that the proposed legislation should be used as an opportunity for the eventual creation of a single form of registered civil marriage, to which parties would at their option be able to add any traditional or religious ceremonies that they might deem appropriate; (see para. 35 above).

In the view of the Sub-Committee it would be a necessary con- comitant of this policy that all marriages in Hong Kong should be dissoluble by agreement, subject to rather more stringent safe- guards than those proposed in respect of Chinese marriages alone by the authors of the Report. The Sub-Committee believes that extension of the principle of divorce by consent would not be in any way offensive to modern secular thinking in either the Chinese or Western communities in Hong Kong, and it is thought that it should be such secular thinking that should guide the preparation of up-to-date matrimonial legislation in a society in which no religion can claim to represent more than a minority group. Accordingly, the Sub-Committee feels it necessary to deal with the subject of dissolution by consent in a context wider than that suggested by the Report, which confines itself to Chinese marriages.

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