‘One Country, Two Systems’ in the 21st Century: A New Policy?

Abstract

Paper for China’s Rise and Its Impact on Asia: Democratization, Development and Culture, March 2009.Thirty-years ago from the ruins of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping and Liao Chengzhi were forming what would eventually become the ‘One Country, Two System’ (OCTS) policy – aspects of which started ‘New China’ on its ‘new long march’ towards socialist modernization, thereby enabling China to become the world power it is today. A vital component of that modernization was the territory of Hong Kong, then a colonial possession of Great Britain and today, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China that continues to serve a special role in the middle kingdom’s rise and reaching out to the West.It was partly on the basis of Deng’s envisioned role for Hong Kong in China’s modernization that he entertained the special policies for it that came to be codified in the Basic Law of the Hong Kong SAR. Those policies were supposed to freeze the community in stasis for fifty-years. However, over the past three decades unforeseen quarrels over elections became the foremost political issues in the Hong Kong community, ultimately eclipsing and sidetracking it from fulfilling Beijing’s original goal of aiding socialist modernization. Concurrent with the transformation of Hong Kong society from a colony in 1978 to being a SAR in 1997 and subsequently moving towards being China’s first international city, has been the democratization of Taiwan – a reality that outstripped OCTS even before Hong Kong returned to China and which has added additional complications for implementing OCTS in Taiwan at some future point.Since 1978, China has experienced phenomenal changes and today China is even advocating democracy. The world situation has also changed dramatically as has China’s standing in it and, more recently, its relationship with Taiwan too. At a juncture which some have described as a ‘new situation’ there are indications that China’s ‘new generation’ of leaders may be considering, or already implementing, changes in the OCTS policy for Hong Kong and potentially towards Taiwan. This paper proposes to examine those indicators and attempt to characterize what a new OCTS might look like and what it portends for Hong Kong and Taiwan.This paper is a component of a larger work in progress on how China’s implementation of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy in Hong Kong has affected the prospects for realizing universal suffrage in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It will be published by the Center for Strategic Intelligence (CSIR), National Defense Intelligence College (NDIC) in early-to-mid 2009. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the CSIR, the NDIC, the Department of Defense or the United States’ Government. Cleared by DOD/OSR for publication: 09-S-1525.