‘Accurately, Completely, and Solemnly’: One Country, Two Systems and an Uneven Constitutional Equilibrium

Abstract

This article analyses the constitutional relation between Mainland China and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong from a comparative legal cultural point of view. The recent controversy surrounding the Hong Kong Legislative Council members’ oath taking serves as a starting point for the analysis in this article. The discussion focuses on the Hong Kong Basic Law, which is conceived as an interface of the underlying meta-doctrine of ‘One Country, Two Systems’. The main argument is that the relation between Mainland China and Hong Kong is best understood as an uneven constitutional equilibrium. The underlying assumption is that the Hong Kong Basic Law is a constitutional interface where the contrasting legal cultural forces meet—that is, it is the place where the civil law type socialist legal system confronts the common law tradition. The article concludes by underlining the importance of path dependence in an attempt to understand and analyse the complicated constitutional balance that exists between the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.