Xi explains his view of ‘one country, two systems’

President Xi Jinping outlined his understanding of the principle of “one country, two systems” in a keynote speech in Hong Kong on the 25th anniversary of the handover to China (China.Table reported). In it, he portrays the division of labor between the two systems as completely intact. On one side, he said, was the socialist system with Chinese characteristics on the Mainland, and on the other was the capitalist system established in Hong Kong before the handover. “This is exactly how the principle was originally conceived,” Xi says explicitly. According to the spirit of his speech, a non-economic dimension was not intended by the contracting parties, China and Great Britain. It was only with the return to the motherland that true democracy had begun in Hong Kong. Before that, it had been under foreign rule.