Those were about the most radical acts of civil disobedience in the territory in recent memory. Hong Kong wasn t always so orderly. Thirty years ago, it was plagued by China-backed riots. Local Communists and Kuomintang sympathizers clashed so often that they had to be segregated. Passions have since cooled, and in the early 1990s the Legislative Council adopted a Bill of Rights and modified the two restrictive laws.
Many people are unhappy.
One clue to the PC s thinking may lie in the makeup of its legal panel, which proposed the changes. It is unusually tilted toward mainland attitudes. Of its 21 members, a dozen are from China and only nine from Hong Kong. That ratio reverses that of the committee as a whole. Some of the mainland members hold senior positions with China s National People s Congress and are more familiar with the mainland s legal system than Hong Kong common law.