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who understandably had Hong Kong's special position in relation to China very much in mind in considering requests for naval visits. The situation was unlikely to change.
4.
Mr Dolgov asked about Ministerial visits. I said that a visit by the Chinese Foreign Minister was outstanding and we hoped that he would be able to come before too long: no dates had yet been fixed. Once the Fifth National People's Congress had been held, we also hoped that a visit could be made by a Chinese "Parliamentary" delegation in return for the several visits to China which had been made by groups from the British Parliament. Our aim was to establish as good a relationship with China across the board as we could. We accepted that, given the widely differing nature of our two societies, there were bound to be limits to what we could probably achieve.
5. At the end of this part of the discussion Mr Dolgov referred to the periodic exchanges on China which we had had with the Soviet authorities. The last talks had been in London and he hoped I might be able to continue them with Mr Kapitsa in Moscow in due course. I said I would be glad to do so and might be able to make a stop-off in connection with a visit to Mongolia, which was within the FED area.
6.
The main point of interest in a brief conversation on Japan was Mr Dolgov's remark that the Soviet Union wished to develop good relations with Japan, though there had been "difficulties over the territorial problem". Having said that, he immediately corrected himself and said the "so-called" territorial problem (I did not comment). We then got on to Mr Fukuda's consultations with ASEAN: Mr Dolgov had nothing noteworthy to say on the subject. There was also a brief reference to Korea. On this I said that our main objective was to ensure that it did not become a focus for conflict in the area. Mr Dolgov said he had seen a newspaper report suggesting that the Japanese might take over part of the US military role when the US withdrew ground troops from Korea. I said I thought this extremely unlikely. The economic links between South Korea and Japan were already extremely close but the Japanese constitution would rule out any direct military involvement by the Japanese in Korea of the kind Mr Dolgov had been speaking of. Furthermore, we believed that it was South Korea's policy to diversify ties with, foreign countries, rather than to seek new exclusive relationships. (I had an opportunity to ask Mr Kato, a visiting Japanese LDP Diet Member, about this at lunch later the same day. Mr Kato said the press had misconstrued questions put to the Japanese (not the other way round) by Senator Glenn - during a recent visit to Tokyo. He agreed that there could be
no question of any such Japanese involvement.)
7. Mr Dolgov told me that he had been an Attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London in the Fifties. He had then been in Canada for five years and had been on the British desk in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. He arrived in London two months ago and said he expected to have a slightly wider range of interests than Mr Voshchankin,
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