Hong Kong, through either the functional constituencies or the
District Boards, and that the elections inside the Election
Committee would take place in an open and fair manner.
Functional Constituencies
67. The Hong Kong Government's 1988 White Paper defined functional constituencies as representing economic and
professional sectors of substantial importance in Hong Kong.
Her Majesty's Government and the Hong Kong Government consider
that if the functional constituency system is to meet the
requirements of fairness and openness, there are two lessons to be learnt from recent experience. First, corporate voting can
lead to an individual having effective control over several
votes in functional constituencies. Second, the very small
electorates in some of the existing constituencies lead to a
risk of corruption, of which there has been a recent example in
Hong Kong. It is therefore necessary to provide for
constituencies of a substantial size.
68.
The Governor's proposals in October 1992 took account of these points. He proposed that for the 21 existing functional constituencies, the process of gradual development should be maintained by replacing all forms of corporate voting with
individual voters. For the nine new functional constituencies,
the Governor proposed that the simplest and fairest approach
would be to define them so that they included the entire
working population. On that basis, the Governor proposed nine constituencies based on the existing classification of
industrial and commercial sectors.
69. The Chinese side's proposals, put forward in round six of
the negotiations, were that the composition and voting method of the existing 21 functional constituencies should remain
precisely as they were in 1991, retaining the concept of
corporate voting.
They proposed that the nine new functional
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