ABSTRACT
In April 1990, the delegates of the seventh National People’s Congress voted to adopt the Basic Law as a mini-constitution for Hong Kong after 1997. Since its issuance, this mini-constitution has given rise to prolonged quarrels over the meaning of ‘accountability’, and the method of selecting the Chief Executive. Many of the disputes seemed to mirror earlier stages in decolonization history, the rows that arose over ‘responsible government’ in nineteenth-century North America and over the ‘dual mandate’ in the period following the First World War. Yet the Basic Law was engineered by the Chinese government and the Hong Kong elite as a result of nearly five years of negotiation. There was neither the presence of a British figure, like Lord Durham in the case of ‘responsible government’, nor a representative from international power like Woodrow Wilson in the case of the Mandate System. More puzzling was the fact that ‘accountability’ was a concept alien to political culture and practice in mainland China. Nonetheless, ‘accountability’ emerged in four articles in the Basic Law. Why did
Beijing concede to a concept and a dualistic structure that later caused such difficulties for its rule in Hong Kong?
