CONFIDENTIAL
HONG KONG
1.
After an exchange of courtesies, Chairman Deng said that the achievement of the leaders of China and Britain was of historic importance. A failure to solve the Hong Kong question would have cast a shadow over the relations between the countries. There was now a very bright future.
2. The Prime Minister agreed. During the past two years of work we had taken people along with us and taken account of their needs. Chairman Deng had received many Hong Kong groups and they had been able personally to hear his assurances and to let him know of their wishes. Many Hong Kong people had visited London to see her. When she had last met members of the Executive and Legislative Councils they had asked her to convey their wish that Chairman Deng should still be alive in 1997 when the agreement was implemented. If people were taken along it made matters far easier to settle satisfactorily in the end. Chairman Deng said that he cherished the hope of visiting Hong Kong if he were still alive in 1997.
3. The Prime Minister said that the stroke of genius in the negotiations had been the concept of "one country, two systems" Deceptively simple, it had been the key that had unlocked the future. Chairman Deng said that if the concept was of far-reaching significance the credit should go to Marxist historical dialectics, or to "seeking truth from the facts" To solve the Hong Kong question peacefully an answer which satisfied China, Britain and the people in Hong Kong had had to be found. The imposition of socialism on the territory would have been easy but would not have been acceptable to Britain or to the people of Hong Kong. Nor, even if it had been acceptable, would it have preserved Hong Kong's prosperity. The same consideration applied to Taiwan. The concept of "one country, two systems" had in fact been devised originally to solve the Taiwan and not the Hong Kong question. It had flowed from Chairman Ye Jianying's nine point proposal in 1980 for Taiwan. Chinese leaders were deeply convinced that it could work and the two years of Sino-British talks appeared to testify to this. The next 63 years would prove the concept. Some people harboured doubts about whether China would honour the agreement. Chairman Deng said that he wished to inform the Prime Minister and the whole world that China had always honoured its commitments.
4. Some Japanese friends had asked why China had set a period of 50 years after 1997 for the duration of the agreement. The reason was that China hoped to approach the economic level of advanced countries by the end of that time. If China wanted to develop itself, it had to open to the outside world for the whole of that period. The maintenance of Hong Kong's stability and prosperity accorded with China's interest in modernising its economy. So the period for the agreement had
CONFIDENTIAL
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