ON Wednesday evening, Governor Chris Patten conceded on television what he earlier neglected to tell the members of the Legislative Council: that China's objective in the current Sino-British negotiations is to restrict the number of Legco members who are elected through genuine and open elections.
If Mr Patten has accurately represented the Chinese negotiating position, then any agreement Britain could reach by caving in to Beijing will surely crush the democratic aspirations of Hong Kong people.
In his second Policy Speech, Mr Patten had already confirmed what has long been speculated in Hong Kong: that the British Government made a significant retreat from the electoral reform proposals he presented in Legco one full year ago. And although manyof the concessions at the negotiating table by the British Government are still shrouded in secrecy, Mr Patten did tell us the substance of the British capitulation which gutted his original functional constituency reforms.
The United Democrats have always maintained that the functional constituencies are a wholly undemocratic way to choose members of the Legislative Council. It is important to remember that the functional constituencies have always been only a transitory step, on the way to full democracy. It has long been questionable whether the functional constituency system could survive a challenge under the Bill of Rights.
The fundamental inequality is that some functional constituencies have only a few hundred - or even a few dozen - voters while geographical constituencies have several hundred thousand.
One of Patten's major goals in his original bill was to make the rotten boroughs of the functional constitu encies less rotten and more democratic. He planned to enfranchise Hong Kong's entire working population of 2.7 million.
One year later, Mr Patten seems to have come around to Beijing's way of seeing things and it is unclear which - if any - of Patten's original proposals will survive the Sino-British bargaining process.