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courses would be a waste of public money.
6. I disagree with virtually everything Mr Clay says in his covering minute. The demand for Chinese speakers will not drop by all that much in 1997. While I have nothing against recruiting suitable Research Department cadres ad hoc, experience shows that there is a relatively small number of administrative posts in which they are normally successful.
7.
There is no point whatever in going for lower levels of proficiency. In my experience the type of officers coming off our language programmes have about the minimum Chinese needed for the jobs which they are expected to be able to do. Lower levels of proficiency, presumably because of the nature of the language, are simply not useful at all. To try to train people to such level is a waste of public money. As for "first class Chinese interpreters" they are simply not
simply not to be had, and certainly not at the level of remuneration which the Government would pay. If such creatures existed (there are perhaps one or two) they could make far more money elsewhere. In any case having such people does not really substitute for having good Chinese speaking officers.
Would you have been able to manage in the negotiations if you had not spoken Chinese, merely with the assistance of Y P Cheng?
8.
As for career planning, I suspect it is precisely because POD attach too much importance to the "cantons" of career planning that we have so much trouble getting hold of Chinese language speakers whom we do already have in the Service. Thus when Chinese speakers were urgently needed during the negotiations, it was found that virtually all of the best ones had been posted elsewhere shortly before they were needed in China. I think it would be more professional to ask what are the requirements of British interests and the Service, and then to adapt career plans to that, than to try to adapt the requirements of the Service to some "canon" of career planning.
17 December 1984
B.S.
There will not be a cadre of Chinare speakers available from
A C Galsworthy
Hong Kong Department
ith gwemment where they di
fficials speak
They King, Very
Very few thi
and white
COVERING SECRET speak it, it is Cantmese
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Fes. 1271,2