Letters from members CA
(None of the
21
Sety for Anglo-Chinese Understanding
has yet been published)
From the Chairman and Deputy Chairman to The Times
"The situation of the relatives and friends of our Mr Anthony Grey and other Dritish citizens detained in China is extremely distressing, and everyone must sympathise with their families and relatives who can get no news of them, But the difficulty of making any effective protest on their behalf is illustrated by a letter from Mr Henry Litton (Secretary of the Hong Kong Bar Association) which appeared in the South China Morning Post on November 16th, referring to Mr John Rear's letter in The Times of November 11th:
"The Hong Kong Government have at present totalitarian powers over the people of Hong Kong in the form of emergency regula- tions, and in particular Regulation 31 of the Emergency (Principal) Regulations which permits the Colonial Secretary to detain any person for a period of one year without trial, without expressing any reason and without having any reason. There is no requirement for the detainee to be given any reason for his detention. At the expiration of one year the detention can be renewed forthwith. Government has, as we know, used these totalitarian powerS SO that to this day (nearly a year after the emergency has ended) we are told that there are still some 40 or 50 persons in detention. As long as this state of affairs prevails in Hong Kong it lies ill for the British Government to complain that British subjects in China have been detained without trial."
"We must also bear in mind what Professor Dore has described in your columns as a hypocritical policy of the British Goverment, in effect delaying the recognition of the right of the People's Republic of China, with its vast population, to be represented in the United Nations. No less provoca- tive is the attitude which our Government has taken to what the Chinese regard as aggression by the United States in South East Asia,
"The aim of our Society is to help to create understanding and friendship between the peoples of Britain and China. This requires us to realise that it is the behaviour of our own Government which is depriving us of our grounds for moral indignation about the detention of British citizens without trial in China. If we were to remove the beam from our own eye, we might expect to have some success in persuad- ing China to take out the mote
or beam from their own."
Joseph Needham
Joan Robinson
-
29th November, 1968