prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting
political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations
or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political
organizations or bodies.^32
However, this concern has never been assuaged. Since the 1840 s, Hong Kong has
been a primary residing site for political dissenters escaping from the Chinese
mainland. Their complaints relate not only to curbs on the freedom of speech,
but also on the freedoms of association, conscience, migration, etc. There was
formidable resistance to potential restrictions of these freedoms when Hong Kong
tried to promulgate a territorial ordinance incorporating Article 23 into the indigen-
ous legal system. After a demonstration on 1 July 2003 numbering more than
50 , 000 , the draft was blocked in the Hong Kong legislature and shelved
indefinitely.
Macau
For Macau, the most eye-catching development is that the special administrative
region was authorised by the Standing Committee of the NPC to take over a part of
an island that had not been under its administration before the sovereign handover.
The distance between Hengqin Island and the Macau isles is merely 200 metres,
and Hengqin is three times larger than Macau. As Macau’s land resources have
been exhausted, the special administrative region petitioned the State Council to
construct the new campus of Macau University in Hengqin instead. The State
Council accepted the new campus of Macau University as central to the special
administrative region’s further prosperity, but many legal issues surrounding border
control, customs and legal jurisdiction were raised. Though in the Chinese main-
land a change of administrative boundary is decided by the State Council itself, this
time the State Council referred the case to the Standing Committee of the NPC for
the final decision.
On 27 June 2009 , the ninth session of the Standing Committee of the eleventh
NPC agreed that the Hengqin campus of Macau University should, from then on,
be under the administration of the Macau authorities, and this part of Hengqin
should be segregated from the rest of the island. In other words, the special
administrative region of Macau has thus been substantially enlarged. This arrange-
ment obviously challenges, and even overturns, many assumptions that ‘one
country, two systems’ is a one-way process to assimilate the special administrative
regions into Chinese orthodox ways, or to ‘mainlandise’ their societies. In sharp
contrast to that opinion, the 2009 decision of the Standing Committee of the NPC
shows the possibilities of ‘de-mainlandising’ some parts of Chinese territory in
accordance with the special administrative regions’ need, demonstrating that the
(^32) The Hong Kong Basic Law, Art. 23.