Book Review Constitutional Confrontation

Much has been written about the flight of Hong Kong residents to various western countries in the past few years. The popular fear of political instability, which has caused this flight, stems from the anticipated transfer of Hong Kong's sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China ("PRC" or "China") in 1997. If present emigration figures' are used to predict the future, however, fewer than one million people are expected to leave Hong Kong before 1997. The rest of the population, roughly five million people, will live in the new political entity known as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ("HKSAR" or "SAR"). The Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed in 1984, promised to allow Hong Kong to enjoy a high degree of autonomy and to maintain economic prosperity and social stability.' The parties involved agreed that the next step was the drafting of the "Basic Law," a constitutional document on which future Hong Kong laws would be based. After two major drafts in 1988 and 1989, a final draft of the Basic Law was adopted by the PRC's National People's Congress in April 1990. Michael Davis, a lecturer in law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has written a book about underlying issues and problems of the 1989 draft, a version similar in spirit and substance to the final