Registry No.
SECURITY CLASSIFICATION
Top Secret,
Secret.
Confidential.
Restricted. Unclassified.
PRIVACY MARKING
.In Confidence
DRAFT
:
TOP SECRET
the extent of the
Colony.
Copy No. 4
Type 1 +
From
y Scopies.
To:-
Annexes
the legal situation
the system of Government
the situation today.
Telephone No. & Ext.
not you drafted
Department
THE FUTURE OF HONG KONG
In the annexes to this paper I set out details of the physical characteristics of the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, of the legal position in respect of our tenure of it and of the situation there today. In this paper I make no proposals which require immediate decisions, but I set out a number of considerations in
relation to the future of the colony which we must
inevitably bear in mind and attempt to set out the options with which any Government will be faced as time
goes on.
2.
The present Chinese Government, and probably any Chinese Government in the foreseeable future, see no
distinction between the status of the territories
by Britain by casion acquired under the Treaties of Nanking and Pęking and
(which are
helt interesse,
that of the New Territories/ All are part of China
and to be recovered at the appropriate time. It is
(for ud) therefore unrealistic/to think of them differently. Moreover for this reason independence is unthinkable
and so is any movement towards constitutional progress
decolmisation)
along conventional lines.
171in
3. Secondly, I cannot see Hong Kong as viable if the
New Territories are detached from it at the expiry of their lease in 1997. The frontier would lie on
Boundary Street a mile from Kowloon docks in the
middle of a built up area;
Kaitak airport would be
in China; so would most of the industrial area and
also the main reservoirs;
grown in British territory.
virtually no food would be
The population remaining
in our control would be of the order of 2 m. assuming that there was not a huge influx from the New Teri Goride.
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