TNAG-2711-FCO40-3917-House-of-Commons-Select-Committee-on-Foreign-Affairs-and-Par-1993 — Page 70

District Boards, Municipal Councils and LegCo elections, and the abolition of appointed membership in District Boards and Municipal Councils. All three are matters on which the views of this Council have been made very clear. Unfortunately the only one of these issues which the Chinese side were prepared to agree in its entirety, as part of a package agreement, was that the voting age should be reduced to 18 for LegCo, District Board and Municipal Council elections. The voting age in China is, of course, 18.

Clearly the Chinese side had no objection in principle to

an interim agreement encompassing LegCo issues.

Indeed they proposed one in which the new voting age would apply to LegCo elections. They themselves proposed that we should recommend to this Council changing the law to permit Hong Kong residents who are members of Chinese People's Congresses to serve in LegCo and in district organisations. We were prepared to agree to that suggestion.

So it is particularly hard to understand why the Chinese side refused to agree to use the "single-seat, single-vote" voting system for all three sets of elections, knowing as they do the time pressures we face. This voting system is already in use in all Municipal Council and two-thirds of District Board elections, and the Chinese side have said that they had no objection to extending it to the remaining one-third of District Board elections. Instead, they argued that the issue of the LegCo voting system should be left aside for discussion with other 'LegCo' issues even though the issue of the LegCo voting system has already been discussed at some length in the talks, and from quite an early stage.

To be of practical value, an interim agreement would need to cover both the voting age and voting method for all three tiers of election.

There are strong practical and political reasons for this. The value of an interim agreement would be that it would buy us a little more legislative time to negotiate on the more difficult issues. Why does the legislation on the LegCo voting method need to be