CONFIDENTIAL 82
機密
Copy No. of Copies
Standing Committee on Pressure Groups (SCOPG) Monitoring of Pressure Group Activities
matters had been the active support given to dissident teachers and
most notable involvement in recent educational students of the Golden Jubilee Secondary School.
The CIC's intervention in trade disputes not only usurpa
the role of the Labour Department but complicates issues, feed erroneous ideas into workers'minds, and render them less amenable to conciliation. Their criticism has always been destructive.
ecrets of the Hong Kong ar‘i-dissident committee; the Chinese script beside 'Confidential' reads Mi, appropriately meaning 'nearly secret'; the Standing Committee on Pressure Groups (SCOPG) osslar runs to nearly 50 pages.
pre-empt future criticisms'. But the Heritage
4
ociety, even though it was the most trifling ea on the government's back, was still a prob- em to bring in". . . to working committee evel as an equivalent to EPCOM does not exist
this particular field'.
Another somewhat unusual pressure group ad considerably bothered the Hong Kong gov- rnment for some time by its regular and well- casoned critical articles in the prestigious outh China Morning Post. The Hong Kong Observers Ltd (again registered as a company o evade restrictions on political organisations) as a mysterious Chinese middle class grouping sufficiently mysterious for the Special ranch to have made a determined and bvious and unsuccessful
attempt to infil- rate.
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A 1978 Special Branch report, quoted in the ecret SCOPG dossiers provided to the New tatesman, bemoans the lack of success of their filtrator because ‘it is not likely that covert ims would be divulged . . . unless ... mem- ers felt confident of the sympathy and confi- entiality of the listener'. The infiltrator's lack f success, so clearly indicated by the Special Branch report, left the government snoopers or once confused about the motives of the organisation, and at a loss for suitable ways to hut them up:
SCOPG considers the Hong Kong Observers one of the more difficult pressure groups to assess as there are still some uncertainties over the group's motives and objectives.
...the HKO does not yet have a solid enough base to really be actually subversive. And, anyway, this wasn't a terribly large flea on the hard-pressed government's back:
Membership is small, only 51 at June 1978, to be
exact.
Nevertheless, the unfathomable quality of this iny lobby body had earned them second place on the SCOPG hit list.
THERE IS LITTLE doubt that these tactics against the only visible signs of opposition in a colony without a democratic political structure are taken seriously by the rulers there. The well- placed Hong Kong source who provided us with he documents said 'such thinking is given high credibility in the Government here.' And SCOPG is only part of a mesh of secret com- mittees which supervise the political life of Hong Kong.
The largest arm of the security bureaucracy is the local Special Branch, whose strength is almost 20 per cent of the entire police force an enormous army of snoopers, unparalleled even in other British colonies. However, their
power is considerably greater than their British
equivalents' as the Director of the Special
Branch has a position comparable to the Direc- tor-General of Britain's MI5. Policy for this secret police force is determined by two further committees the Governor's Security Com- mittee, and the super-secret Local Intelligence Committee.
The LIC is the principal focus for the numer- ous British and American spooks with which Hong Kong abounds and whose absurdities were well described in Le Carre's The Honou- rable Schoolboy. The Political Adviser from the British Foreign Office sits at the head of the table with the bosses of Hong Kong security. (To meet the usual diplomatic customs this British Office official is in fact responsible for all dealings with the Chinese People's Republic
whose representative, equally absurdly, is not an accredited diplomat but in fact head of the local branch of the New China News Agency.)
Other members of LIC include the Commis- sioner of police, the Director of the Special Branch and representatives of MI5, MI6 and other bits of British intelligence. MI6 is dis- guised as the 'Study Group' in British Forces HQ; its Head is their station chief Barry Gane; his equivalent from M15 is commonly and happily known as the 'Security Liaison Officer. More powerful than these two is Government Communications Officer Terry Nelson, who is in charge of Britain's GCHQ signals intelligence monitoring station at Little Sai Wan (see NS 16 and 23 July 1980). Finally there is Lt Col Harry Sloane, head of Joint Services Intelligence Staff, whose department has recently been racked by its own corruption scandal; his staff were selling off, at a substantial price, passes for admission to Hong Kong to illegal immi- grants who would otherwise have been sent
back north.
THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIĆ of China are considerably to blame for Hong Kong's lack of democracy. As one local security official explained, much of the repressive effort expended by the colonial government is intended to appease 'Big Brother to the North'. Officially, Hong Kong is regarded by China as part of Guangdong province 'tempo- rarily under foreign rule'. And the Chinese have made their views of a popular democracy quite clear; the source most often quoted by Hong Kong and Foreign Office officals is a letter written by the Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations to the UN Decolonisation
Contd on p. 12
Colonialism
Contd from p.9
Committee. This states that the 'introduction of any element of self-rule in Hong Kong' (meaning democracy or a meaningful fran- chise) would be construed by the Chinese gov- ernment as an 'unfriendly act'; diplomatically tantamount to opening hostilities.
According to well placed officials who have spoken to the New Statesman, Hong Kong is prohibited by an axis between Whitehall and Peking from any extension of democracy. The Security Branch of the Hong Kong government maintains Top Secret files which discuss the finer points of introducing greater democracy in various areas of the administration; a large part of their contents is taken up with the prob- lems of Chinese government reaction. 'We don't want three Chinas' is a common watch- cry. One official acknowledged that 'the limita- tions of democracy are accepted by the British Government under pressure from Peking'.
Left wing activity is particularly disliked by Peking; this was so even under Mao. A demon- stration by students outside the New China News Agency office which the police did not put down had the Director of the Agency round to see the colonial governor Sir Murray Mac- Lehose, the same night.
MacLehose is one of Hong Kong's big prob- lems. Although his rule put an end to a succession of graft-takers, he has now ruled for nine years
turning, in effect, autocracy into dictator- ship. As former Peking Chargé d'Affaires his. Chinese links are close, and Hong Kong is imperceptibly becoming part of the People's Republic. One of the more extraordinary moments for Hong Kong spooks occurred two years ago when the Head of the JSIS unveiled new spy aircraft photographs showing that Chi- nese coastal defences had been re-aligned to protect Hong Kong's approaches, instead of defending China from them. Peking is biding its time. And the time to give Hong Kong and its citizens any freedom and civil rights is accordingly — running out.
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