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HONG KONG: GERMAN PRESS COVERAGE
19 August 1983
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Since the Ambassador wrote to the Governor on 31 May, Hong Kong has continued to figure periodically in the German press. You may find it useful to have a round up of this coverage. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which is the Federal Republic's most important paper, carried two pieces in late July/early August by Ulrich Grudinski, their London correspondent. suggest that the negotiations with the Chinese government were making slow but sensible progress. The July piece, which appeared as a front page editorial, suggested that the Prime Minister was making good use of her Falkland's success to ensure that a solution for Hong Kong, sensible for both China and the United Kingdom, was achieved. An autonomous "Hong Kong special economic zone" would save the faces of both sides. An article in Die Welt, the leading conservative newspaper, by Oskar Weggel of the Hamburg Asian Studies Institute, took a similar line, at the same time sounding a warning to the Chinese that any Hong Kong zone would have to be more attractive than their existing "special zones" of Shenzhen and Zhuhai. A third piece on these lines appeared in the Westdeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung, the major centre-left daily in the industrial Ruhrgebiet, on 17 August. It is suggested that although there was uncertainty in the markets in Hong Kong, this was not as serious as at the time of the cultural revolution and implied that China would strive to ensure that it did not provoke an economic crisis in a place so crucial for its own economy.
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2. A quite contrary note was struck by an article in the Munich- based Süddeutsche Zeitung on 2 August. Their S.E. Asia correspondent, Verena Stern, writing from Singapore, allowed that the markets had stabilised somewhat since talks between the UK and China had recommenced, but attributed this much to wishful thinking.
She
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