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9. I still sec a certain amount of force in these
arguments, and I would welcome the premature release of
the newsworkerg
if the Governor, having taken full account
of local circums tancas, were to decide it on his own
initiative.
I now attach less weight than I did in May
I think that with
to the snags presented by
the passage of time the public would no longer be inclined
to differentiate him from the other ten, and that the Governor
could make a collective gesture in respect of all eleven
without calling in question the use of the review procedure
last May.
10.
However, the crux of the matter is that in our telegram
No. 444 we have left it to the Governor to decide whether
premature release is compatible with the security of Hong Kong
in the short and in the long term. I am sure that the
Governor
and his advisers
would not be convinced by the
arguments in par graph 8. They would maintain, as they have
done from the outset, that a policy of firmness is called for.
In his telegram To. 588, the Governor argues that "concessionary
actions" encouraje a belief in our susceptibility to pressure
rather than stim late any genuine reciprocity by the Chinese
and he would certainly regard the premature release of the
newsworkers as a "concessionary' action". I do not propose
to analyse his arguments in detail here, since I am doing so
in another submision of wider context.
But I am sure that if
we were to ask him specifically to consider premature release
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