CONFIDENTIAL
6/1
BRIGH
KFX Burns Esq
Trade Policy Department
R+ph
Foreign & Commonwealth Office
27/10
23 April 1971
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GENERALISED PREFERENCES
We were grateful to receive Hong Kong telegram No 227 of 1 April, your telegram No 212 of 6 April to us, and the letter from the Colonial Secretariat in Hong Kong CR 4/5401/64 IV of 16 April, concerning documentation about Hong Kong which had been requested by the Japanese. In the absence of Otaka. who is sick, I called this morning on Tanaka, the Deputy Head of the division dealing with generalised preferences in the Economic Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and handed him the documents, I explained that these were being given to him in response to a series of requests from
I MITI and the Ministry of Finance over the past 6 months. hoped that the information now being provided would finally assuage other ministries' thirst for details about Hong Kong. Tanaka took the point and said that he would pass on the infor- mation to the appropriate officials.
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2. I took the opportunity to ask Tanaka about the way in which the implementation of the Japanese offer on generalised preferences would be made following the passage of the Bill through the Diet on 29 March. Tanaka said that almost total confusion reigned. He estimated that a full 3 months would be needed to get through all the necessary paperwork prior to implementation, even with the assistance of computers. these circumstances, it was virtually impossible for the Japanese offer to be implemented on the original target date of 1 July. Moreover, the problem of how to deal with particularly African countries which still invoked Article XXXV of the GATT against Japan was far from solved. He thought that these countries would in the end be included in the Japanese list of beneficiaries mainly because of the adverse effect which exclusion might have on Japan's standing vis à vis the Africans in the United Nations. Implementation of the Japanese offer could not slip too far, since implementation, at least in part, by 1 October was required under the terms of the legislation which was passed last month.
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CONFIDENTIAL