U
CONFIDENTIAL
British Embassy
3100 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington DC 20008
Telex Domestic USA 89-2370/89-2384
Telex International 64224(WUI)/440015(ITT) Telephone (202) 462-1340
1. dr Hame
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KC Walker Esq
Asian Region Research Department FCO
Your reference
Our reference
Date
18 December 1984
TUCK 020/2.
RECEIVED IN ALGASTRY 2 REC4
DESK COF INDEX
من الحله
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Sear Ken.
TAIWAN/HONG KONG
1. Thank you for your letter of 23 November. We have indeed been looking for evidence of hostile Taiwanese attitudes or activities with relation to the Hong Kong agreement very carefully since last summer (David Hannay's teleletter of 13 September to Tony Galsworthy and our JICTEL no. 204 of 20 September). You may also have seen our periodic "nil returns" since then (Mark Pellew's letters of 9 October and 2 November to Galsworthy, and my teleletter of 5 December recording Wolfowitz's remarks to Sir W Harding).
2. Everything else I have heard is in the same vein. Fred Brown, Senior Staffer on the Senate Asian Affairs Sub-Committee told me that he had heard no complaints about the Hong Kong agreement from any source. Don Anderson, the Director for China in the State Department, who, together with Mark Pratt, the Director of the Taiwan Coordination Office in the State Department sees the Taiwanese here regularly on an unofficial basis, told me that Fred Chen also had said little about the agreement beyond taking the predictable defensive line that the agreement was not a model for reunification of Taiwan with the motherland. He had said that the provisions of the agreement on civil aviation etc. would pose a severe problem for his authorities in 1997, since there could be no question of direct contacts between Taiwan and the Communists, but his personal comment had been that 13 years was a long time. Another State Department source with Taiwanese connections told me that AIT and the Consulate-General in Hong Kong had been tasked (possibly as a result of our conversations with State Department in late August) with reporting on what Taiwan might do to undermine the agreement. Their replies had been that there was little practical that they could do.
3. The assessment in my JICTEL under reference accords with your own comments. I doubt if the US assessment has changed, but I will continue to keep an ear open with all my contacts on this question.
4. You also asked about the Henry Liu case. As you say, Liu was shot in San Francisco on 15 October by
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