the Legislature [40].
The April 1988 text of the draft Law contained 5 alternative methods for selecting the Chief Executive and 4 for
for constituting the Legislature.
The Executive
22. The Chief Executive is the head of a government with a general executive power in areas within the high degree of autonomy of the SAR. He is to be accountable both to the CPG and to the Legislature of the SAR; and he may serve for up to two terms of up to five years each[41]
He is required to be a "local inhabitant" [42] which, in terms of the Basic Law, means a Chinese citizen of not less than 40 years of age who is a permanent resident of the SAR with (and this requirement here and elsewhere is
is a
a direct consequence of the
of the announcement
announcement in December 1989 of a programme for confering British nationality on 50,000 heads of families in Hong Kong) no right of abode in any other
country.
There can be little doubt that the selection process is structured to ensure that the candidate that' emerges for appointment by the CPG will be Beijing's man. The Joint Declaration's proposal that the Chief Executive shall be "selected by election or through consultations held locally" has come to mean elected by a committee of 800 representatives, themselves either elected by "functional" constituencies (400 representatives will come from the generally more conservative elements in Hong Kong society) or selected from amongst political bodies which include Hong Kong members of the NPC and of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative
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