The Rule of Law, The Rule of Conflict? Hong Kong and Democracy—Past and Present Revisited1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“The rule of law is essential to Hong Kong’s future” — declared the last governor of Hong Kong, Christopher Patten, a few years before the city’s handover to China. The rule of law, obviously, is essential to the future of any legal entity. However, one has to ask what happens if the law that rules is imperfect. It then inevitably leads to conflicts. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how efficiently has the rule of law ‘ruled’ in Hong Kong since the transition, with a special focus on the situations when law itself led to conflicts. In his analysis the author concentrates on the post-colonial influences of the past, People's Republic of China’s influences of the present, and outlines possible scenarios for the future of the Chinese Special Administrative Region, while highlighting the question of democracy. The article is divided into two main parts–theoretical, composed of one chapter, and analytical, composed of two chapters. In the first part of the article the author reviews various understandings of the notions of the rule of law and of conflict, introducing the theoretical framework for further investigations. The second chapter of the article is devoted to the question of the rule of law in the semi-autonomous city. The author first explains why its explicit conceptualisation was revolutionary in Hong Kong at this particular moment, and then shows how it has been eroding ever since 1997. In the third chapter of the paper, the author focuses on the situations in Hong Kong when law itself has provoked conflicts — notably the recent oath-swearing dispute — and analyses them. The fourth, concluding part of the paper the author ventures to make predictions on the future of the legal systems, democracy, and thus the lives of the citizens of the Fragrant Harbour.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".