Im 1/1/08 Mr Carter. in Собит
For
information.
AVG
1/i/8.
241
15th December, 1967
You may be interested to know that despite the long hours of hard words and mutual recriminations during the discussions at Shum Chun I was able to make quiet contact with two of their team during the recesses. Nothing of any great moment emerged from these talks but I believe that if the talks had gone on much longer it might have been possible to get down to laying the ground work for discussing other border problems.
2.
On one occasion I found myself walking around outside with Mr. Ma. Before the recess there had been a long and acrimonious discussion of our point that we expected Chinese farmers and workers to behave themselves when they were on our side of the border. I referred to the behaviour of Chinese oyster fishermen in Deep Bay as a good example as the way in which we expected them not to act, and expressed the hope that it might be possible to discuss the oyster bed problems at some stage. Mr. Ma said that he did not know a great deal about the oyster bed issues but did know that they were extremely complex and related to traditional interests. He then rather surprisingly said that disputes like these between peasants were very much like disputes between husbands and wives and should not be the subject of interference by outside bodies. The peasants should be left to sort their differences out amongst themselves. He made it quite clear that the last thing that he would like to do would be to become involved in the Deep Bay imbroglio. In any case he gave me to understand (although I may have got this wrong given his heavy Ning Po accent) that the Shum Chun Inspection Station was not responsible for the Deep Bay area. He said that the responsibility of the Shum Chun Inspection Station stretched between Shautaukok and Man Tao which may well have meant that the border is split up into three sections of which Shum Chun is the middle one. If this is the case then the She Chun Station obviously has been made responsible for all land owned on our side of the border.
3.
Out of the blue Mr. Ma asked me if I was going to Peking in the near future. I said that I had no such plans at present and that in any case it was a little difficult these days given the restrictions on our diplomats. He immediately said that the Chinese Government had released some children and two women. I said that I hoped that this heralded an early solution of the difficulties between our two countries. Mr. Ma said that these of course were international questions but for his part sincerely hoped that relations would be normalised quickly.
4.
On another day Mr. Chou took me aside to show me some photographs of atrocities which have been committed by the Hong Kong police. He had been prompted to do this by the production by ourselves on a previous occasion of photographs showing how the propagation of the thoughts of the Chairman in Hong Kong was carried on quite legally. Mr. Chou spoke in a
R. Whitney, Esq.,
Office of the British Charge d'Affaires,
PEKING
/totally
HWA 411
13