Chapter 6 traces the trajectory of a renewed consciousness of the rule of law and various freedoms in the final decade of colonial rule and unpacks the geopolitical concerns and motivations of the British government in de-silencing Hong Kong before the handover in 1997. The conclusion in 1984 of negotiations between Britain and China on the reversion of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the latter marked the opening of an era of liberalistic rule of law and individual freedoms in Hong Kong. Laws and regulations that had been used to suppress free speech, control publication and prosecute political protesters were loosened or repealed one after another in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hong Kong’s first statute expressly recognising freedom of speech, assembly and association was passed only in 1991, just six years before the colonial era came to an end. Not only were laws and senior judicial appointments liberalised in the last decade of British rule, but the 1980s and 1990s also witnessed unprecedented levels of public discussion of, and official and media narratives on, the importance of free speech and the rule of law to Hong Kong.

In Chapter 4, I interpret Joe Ma’s Lawyer, Lawyer (1997; 算死草), a farcical comedy of seemingly little jurisprudential value, as a response to debates about the future of the common law in Hong Kong after 1997. In the years leading up to the handover, there were heated discussions of whether the common law should continue to be cited in the territory after China resumed sovereignty, and if so, what kind of authority English precedent should have. While some staunch common law lawyers argued for preserving English law’s privileged status, more reform-minded jurists argued for cutting the territory’s “constitutional umbilicus” from England by relying on local cases. I will contend that the lawyer in Ma’s film wins his case by relying on an English precedent case that is hinted at, but not explicitly mentioned, and further suggest that his highly unorthodox way of citing precedent provides an indication of how Hong Kong can conceive of the place of the English common law after 1997.