37
Mr.
Larmour
(2
STAFF: IN CONFIDENCE
Secondments to the Hong Kong Government.
I have asked my P.A. to try and arrange a meeting to discuss the minutes below which you have sent me on this subject.
It may be helpful if before we meet I let you have my reactions to the minutes since the examination of the question here has led to a variety of misconceptions or distortions of the original proposals, viz:-
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(a)
(b)
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From my consultation with Mr. Wilford and Mr. Murray the difficulties in the way of posting to Peking an officer who has served in Hong Kong have been exaggerated in para.3(ii) of Mr. Martin's note of 15 December. Mr. Wilford and Mr. Murray are in fact strong advocates of Diplomatic Service secondments to Hong Kong. The point they make is that there may be on occasion a risk that an individual officer, as the result of his parti- cular duties in Hong Kong, might become involved in publicity which in turn might make the Chinese unwilling to issue him a visa, but this risk would arise in the case of individuals and not generally; we could endeavour to minimise it by arrangements for his particular posting in Hong Kong.
In any event it was not part of the Governor's proposals that secondments should be restricted to Chinese speaking officers (Diplomatic Service Chinese speaking officers are trained in Mandarin and the bulk of the population of Hong Kong are Cantonese speakers). He did not in fact mention such officers in his proposals and prominence has been given to them in subsequent discussion here because of the initial reaction at this end that his ideas could offer a niche for Chinese speaking officers who at any particular time could not be immediately posted to Peking. Somehow or other we seem to have got into the position of assuming that the Governor was only interested in Chinese speakers. This is not so.
We also seem to be approaching this from the point of view that the Governor is asking us for help in his staffing difficulties. On the contrary he put forward the idea originally in the context of helping us in our responsibilities for the continued staffing of dependent territories - a subject on which as you know the P.U.S. only yesterday expressed his uneasiness after studying the Morgan/Rolfe interim report on the general question, of which you have already had a separate copy. That report in fact shows that Hong Kong staffing difficulties are at present comparatively less than those of other dependent territories, though admittedly this happy position may not continue as time goes on. On the other hand there is a pressing political need to dispel the present prejudice in Hong Kong, not least among the
/unofficial
STAFF: IN CONFIDENCE