HONG KONG -- Right from the start, the current legal and political case concerning "right of abode" in Hong Kong has been a journalist's nightmare. Highly complex, profoundly nuanced, and containing contradictory strands, the case was impervious to easy simplification. Both sides to the dispute could legitimately claim to be concerned with Hong Kong's survival. The case pitted Beijing's enduring pursuit, since ancient times, of central control rather than autonomy, against Hong Kong's vital need for local autonomy rather than control.

Beneath the surface, the issue also set China's pragmatic need to preserve Hong Kong's prosperity against China's deep-seated yearning to develop "one China." Above all, the dispute raises the issue whether the impersonal rule of law can ever fully flourish amid China's enduring addiction to more arbitrary rule by men. No one article can possibly deal adequately with all these and several other themes.

Immediately, China has "solved" Hong Kong's future population problem, but only at the very high price of raising grave doubts about its ability to grant Hong Kong the "high degree of autonomy" that Beijing earlier pledged in return for the colony's return to the motherland.