CBI
BRITISH INDUSTRY
CONFEDERATION OF
Confederation of British Industry
Honorary Regional Correspondent: Mr. Leonard Rayner
Robert Adley M.P.,"
Associated Business Systems Ltd.,
Ambassador House,
Airspeed Road,
Christ church,
Dorset BH23 4HD,
England.
My dear Robert
49 Middleton
Towers
140 Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
Tel: 5-876234
5th October, 1983.
Pusonal
Your long promised visit has not materialised but I gather that a television interview you gave in London was shown out here. I was away at the time but have just got a tape of it.
→
In it you made two points which could give rise to misunderstanding.
Firstly you stated that the British government should have conceded sovereignty over Hong Kong long ago. At the time of the reoccup- ation in 1945 the KMT in China did, in fact, want the place but the Attlee government, which was totally committed to Indian independence, insisted on taking Hong Kong back.
After the 'liberation' in 1949, Premier Zhou Enlai made it clear, throughout the 1950s, that the PRC did not want to take it over. In 1967, when the Cultural Revolution spilt over into Hong Kong i it was China's for the taking but again it was Beijing who called a halt to the riots and left the colony in peace.
In 1974 the Portuguese told China to take Macau back but the Chinese almost begged the Portuguese to stay on and finally made a deal in 1976 but, despite rumours to the contrary, sovereignty stayed with Portugal.
I would recommend to you an Oxford University Press publication China and Hong Kong; The Economic Nexus - which shows all to clearly why a premature surrender of sovereignty could have been disastrous to China. To suggest that Britain should have conceded sovereignty long ago, in the context of the Macau experience, is, in fact, an implied criticism of the PRC. China insisted at the United Nations in the 1960s that Hong Kong was not a colonial issue and Britain's tacit acceptance of this view was to say that, in principle, both parties agreed where ultimately sovereignty
lay.
х
Cont'd..../2