China ends in Hong Kong: Will Peking abrogate self-government?

Kay Moeller

No 6/2004, SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Abstract: On 26 April 2004, the Head of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region communicated the People's Republic of China (PRC) leadership's decision not to allow democratic elections in the former British colony for the foreseeable future. Some observers have qualified this move as a breach of the 1990 Basic Law in which Hong Kong had been promised 'a high degree of autonomy' including the possibility of free and direct elections from 2007 onwards. Since July 2003, the territory's citizens have twice taken to the streets in the hundreds of thousands. As of today, according to the academic Hong Kong Transition Project, some 80 percent of citizens have adopted the demand for democratisation. Should China maintain its hardline approach, it risks endangering the fragile equilibrium of economic openness and nationalism on which the PRC's stability has thus far been founded. (SWP Comments / SWP)

Date: 2004
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