ARTICLE 19 and The Hong Kong Journalists Association
watershed in the political development of the colony, ushering in a realignment of political forces. Historically, the majority of appointed members tended to support the government, reflecting their co-option by the colonial power. This gave the authorities a built-in majority in the Council, a feature the government might have expected to continue despite nearly one third of legislators being directly elected. Under the new-look Council, however, conservative- minded appointees have increasingly "looked North" to Beijing, the future sovereign power, on sensitive transitional issues, whereas their more liberal, elected counterparts, though by no means sympathetic to the colonial power, have found themselves supporting the government - notably Mr Patten's recent proposals for further democratic development. With liberal and conservative views now more evenly represented, this has made the process of policy approval considerably more precarious.
When China signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the 1984 agreement codifying the transfer of sovereignty, it was understood to ensure that after 1997 the Hong Kong SAR would retain its present capitalist system and freedoms for 50 years. Under the principle of "one country, two systems", the SAR would be able to exercise a high degree of autonomy and enjoy executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication.
While there were many who wished to believe the best of what seemed a reasonable agreement, there were those who urged caution. The Joint Declaration, they said, was open to broad interpretation, and it would be unrealistic to expect the incumbent Chinese leadership not to want to exert its authority in a territory over which it held sovereignty. Hong Kong was, after all, being handed back to an authoritarian state with little understanding or care for its comparative civil freedoms.
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1.2 CHINA'S POLICIES
This view proved accurate. Since 1984, China has single-mindedly pursued its own political agenda for the handover, extracting concessions on the interpretation of the Joint Declaration from a Britain that early on had decided a "smooth" transfer of sovereignty was paramount. When the Basic Law was promulgated by China in April 1990, less than a year after the massacre of democracy protestors in Beijing in June 1989, it contained a number of serious inconsistencies with the Joint Declaration. Among these were provisions which stripped the SAR judiciary of its promised constitutional independence, and which require that the SAR enact laws prohibiting "subversion", a concept with no validity under the Hong Kong legal system. Many had been added to the final draft of the Basic Law a result of China's fears, following the massacre, of Hong Kong being a "subversive" threat to the power of the central government. These inconsistencies have put into serious question China's undertaking to allow the SAR a "high degree of autonomy", and to observe present rights and freedoms after 1997.
The impact of the massacre itself, of course, has been the causal factor for the low degree of confidence Hong Kong people have had in China respecting their rights and freedoms. Aside from constitutional concerns, Beijing's policies on the ground since 1989 - especially towards
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