nature to common law commentators, but they were raised also
in China[9] and were apparently such that the NPC
considered it desirable to take account of them. At the same time as it adopted the Basic Law, the NPC took a decision in a form that has normative effect in which, after reciting the adoption of the Basic Law and Article 31, it baldly stated that the Basic Law "is constitutional". For Western critics that may smack of pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps, but given that the NPC is the highest organ of state power and the Chinese doctrine of legislative
interpretation [10] the decision, no doubt, concludes the
J
matter in Chinese eyes.
The Central Authorities
9. If there was a somewhat academic aspect to the Article 31 issue ( no one wanted the one country two systems aspect of the Joint Declaration to fall at that hurdle), the same cannot be said of some of the proposals in the draft Basic Law for resolving questions which concerned the relationship between the SAR and the Central Authorities. The as yet untried concept of a special administrative
region[11], together with the promises of a high degree of
autonomy and that the laws of Hong Kong would remain basically unchanged, tended to foster an underlying perception, which influenced thinking in Hong Kong in the years immediately following the signature of the Joint Declaration, of the distinctive nature of the SAR (in
8
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