Does One Country exercise somr kind of primacy over Two Systems, as mainland officials increasingly assert? Can you actually have two systems in one country when the systems are so dissimilar, verging on incompatible? In some lights, the slogan has the look of magical thinking.  China is a one-party state: the CCP is not just the governing party, it claims the state itself, the People's Republic.  How does that factor into One Country, Two Systems? Are Two Systems even possible in such a political environment?

To take one issue that relates to the question of academic freedom, consider the question of authority.  Academic freedom means intellectual inquiry where nothing is ruled out, and everything is subject to scrutiny, debate, and test.  It is no respector of external authority: it cannot be and remain free.

The principle underlying such inquiry was enunciated by John Stuart Mill: "The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on , but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded." On such beliefs the jury is always still out.  How can such a claim to perpetual debate be compatible with a system of absolute political authority, resting on a monological ideology accorded the status of unquestionable scientific fact, served by a political institution with its own army? 

In one sense, One Country, Two Systems was no less than a utopian desire to square this circle.