The commentary of late, in your reports, editorial and op-ed pages, and in the many letters to the editor, gives one some cause for optimism with respect to the way forward in building “one country, two systems”.
Reading the comments from
Bernard Chan,
Henry Litton,
Alex Lo, and even
Hu Xijin (surprise, surprise), as well as many others, it feels like we need some way to speak with a single voice to lay out options to galvanise the “one country, two systems” principle.
Making Deng Xiaoping’s
vision of “one country, two systems” work better will require pragmatism, outside-the-box thinking, and compassion.
Here are a few ideas to start with:
1. Extend the June 30,
2047 date by 100 years. This is a must.
2. Get behind the “one country two systems” concept and bolster it. This will require the efforts of the financial big guns of Hong Kong, our best legal minds, environmentalists, a few Communist Party folks, some of our academics, a few of the protest leaders and other stakeholders.
3. My pet idea: a currency union between Singapore and Hong Kong to challenge the
US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The combined massive reserves of these two financial centres would be impressive and could make for feelings of security, compared with the US government’s public debt of US$22 trillion, which is seriously scary. Such a union would need time to gel. Maybe 10 to 15 years?
Stuart R. McCarthy, Causeway Bay
China loyalists sound like pre-1949 Kuomintang
Here we go again. China’s one-party government organisations are blaming
liberal studies classes for the Hong Kong protests, citing the oft-repeated mantra of “disloyalty to mainland China”. This comes even though, under the
Joint Declaration, a treaty registered with the United Nations, Hong Kong was to be governed by the Basic Law under the “one country, two systems” principle.
Chinese organisations now sound like the Kuomintang (KMT) of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that was sent in to demobilise and destroy the Communist Party cells of Mao Zedong before the successful 1949 “poverty” revolution that remade China. It’s really odd that thought-provoking dissenting viewpoints cannot be accepted under the Basic Law. China’s government now seems more like a renegade KMT reactionary.
Gerald Heng Snr, Washington
