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4.
Mr Donald said that Chinese propaganda had recently started calling for more democracy in Hong Kong. There was a danger here because the Chinese interpretation might mean that they would seek to convince only those people in Hong Kong who would support China's case. This was not what we would mean by democracy.
5. Mr Donald said there were probably three groups of opinion in Hong Kong. There was a large group of people at the bottom of the scale who felt they could not influence the situation at all and who probably reckoned that they would have to stay in Hong Kong and bear with whatever solution was agreed between Britain and China. There was a second group of young people in Hong Kong, many in the professional classes, who were very
important for the running of Hong Kong. Some of them would be
able to leave Hong Kong if they did not feel enough confidence
in the future. Others, conscious of the effects of the British
Nationality Act, might well want to make a go of co-existence
and co-operation with the Chinese communists. An older group
who had ties of loyalty with Britain might prefer to go for opposition to China and to make Britain responsible for any evil
consequences. As he saw it, Mr Donald said that historically
those who had tried to take the Chinese system head on had often
come to grief. Those who were prepared to give the Chinese 'face' and to adopt a suitable posture which the Chinese would
see as appropriate humility, had often been rewarded much more
than they had ever expected.
6. Mr Brown asked whether the infighting in Peking over the rectification campaign was relevant to the Hong Kong negotiations.
Mr Donald said not. These internal developments might affect
other areas of Chinese foreign policy, but policy on Hong Kong
was unchanged. Even a KMT government would follow similar policy.
It suited many to say that the Chinese did not understand how the
Hong Kong economy worked, but the main operators on both sides understood it well. What we had proposed had so far not removed their suspicions that we wanted to continue administering Hong Kong after 1997, but the underlying relationship between Britain
/and China
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}