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Since its return to Chinese sovereignty 22 years ago, Hong Kong has been governed by the" One Country, Two Systems" framework, under which it enjoys a high degree of autonomy and practises separate economic, legal, and social systems from those of China. The framework is underpinned by the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international treaty, and elaborated in Hong Kong's post-handover constitutional document, the Basic Law. The framework is a constitutional experiment: it seeks to preserve a liberal pocket within a socialist party state, an ambition that is unprecedented. That experiment has not been plain sailing. The tensions between Leninist authoritarian and liberal constitutionalist ideas within the framework have been manifested at the social, institutional and constitutional levels, calling into question the viability of maintaining two such highly divergent visions of constitutionalism within one …