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CONFIDENTIAL
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Jor
Mr Male
/
Sir D Watson
Lord Granny
Puvali meray Letter sent.
THE HONG KONG RESEARCH PROJECT
1.
is/s
Lord Goronwy-Roberts will wish to know of the attached booklet "Hong Kong: A Case to Answer". The publishers have sent an advance copy to the Secretary of State, asserting that it is for him to answer their case, and saying that they looked forward to his response to the booklet's publication.
2.
Since the booklet was published on 5 September, it has received some publicity. Articles in the Guardian and New Statesman are attached and also the transcript of an interview with Mr James Sillars MP on BBC Radio 4. The Hong Kong Government Commissioner, Mr Kidd, has been invited to appear on Radio 4 today, 9 September, to answer Mr Sillars's allegations. He has accepted and is being briefed by Hong Kong.
3.
Apart from these three instances there has been no public interest or comment. However, the booklet was neatly timed to coincide with the TUC debate on Hong Kong, on which I have submitted separately. The TUC motion was adopted (it was the last motion before the conference ended). It aroused no interest. The
next round in the debate will be the Overseas Labour Consultative
Committee, for which no date has been fixed.
4.
The Hong Kong Research Project is an off-shoot of the Association for Radical East Asian Studies (AREAS), a left-wing and partly Trotskyist group. The group was originally largely concerned with Vietnam, but has turned its attention to Hong Kong in the last two years. The booklet is a fairly typical example of thorough but very selective statistical research,linked, without any rigorous logic, to conclusions which aim to show that Britain should divest itself of Hong Kong-forthwith. Examples of the
selective choice of facts are the section on Economic and Social
Conditions, where the dates of the comparison of social expenditure and general revenue are carefully chosen to antedate the Governor's new social programme, unlike other parts of the report where the
/statistics
CONFIDENTIAL