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19
HKK 040/1
Reference
Mr Williamson Ju.
FUTURE OF HONG KONG: THE SEVENTIES
НСК Cuoli
RECEIVED IN REGISTRY KO. 51
12 FFR 1921
DEAK OFFICER INDEX
REGISTRY
PA Action Taken
1. You asked for observations on Mr Walker's minute of 2 February and the attached magazine article.
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2. The blueprint offered by The Seventies is in a way an ideal "solution" if it postpones indefinitely the fateful day of resumption by China. But this holds good only so long as the 15 year count-down is never triggered off. Once notice to quit is given, then Hong Kong will start to run down. It would be replacing 1997 with no less inexorable a deadline.
3. The author appreciates our need for a legal basis for our presence, but offers no suggestion as to how this might be given.
The fifth declaration listed reads too much like a let-out clause that could enable any more doctrinaire régime to reclaim Hong Kong on a slender pretext.
4.
5. The last sentence of the first paragraph on page 3 is ill- considered if it is intended as an assurance. If 15 years were "precisely" enough time to raise mainland standards of living to Hong Kong levels (and there is little chance of that), then the Chinese would be giving notice in 1983, and that would defeat the point of the whole exercise.
6. In sum, this does not seem to me to be officially-inspired. The Seventies, like other new-wave Leftist magazines in Hong Kong, has had its ups and downs with the PR and (if I remember rightly. was for a time banned on account of its reporting of student unrest.
A W Friar
3 February 1981
Hong Kong and General Department
the blist
Yes/pl A
2.
CODE 18-77
SS &178
tur frais minuto above. This is
thes is uiteresting but I doubt if the walker is correct in suggesting that
the author will have had some form of privical clearance.
Dou
1
I will ach Dr. Wilson for his comments.
Mr. Williams 19.2.
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