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to do this through friendly members of the Basic Law Drafting
Committee. He was coming to the conclusion that if we wanted
to get a clear view over we should have to find a way of doing it directly. With this in mind he had produced and gave to us a preliminary draft of clauses on the basic structure of
Government for the Basic Law which we might give to the
Chinese.
9.
In discussion it was suggested that it could be very dangerous to try to give the Chinese a paper purporting to
be a draft of any kind of the Basic Law. If the Chinese
became over sensitive, they could actually become inhibited from using our ideas merely because they were too obviously our ideas. It was also pointed our that the Basic Law Paper
was not entirely accurate in suggesting that we had a locus
standi in the actual drafting of the Basic Law. We had a
locus in the result of the drafting process in that we could
take a view that it did not conform with the Joint Declaration.
But this did not extend to a locus in the drafting of the Basic Law. In practice it would be silly to wait around until
the Basic Law appeared and risk having a confrontation at that
point. But we needed to be very careful about how we presented
our ideas to the Chinese.
10. The Governor suggested that the way to approach the
problem was to disguise our paper as a "paper on convergence".
In further discussion we wondered whether it would not be
possible to write a paper describing the present set up in
Hong Kong (emphasising the real rather than the constitutional
position), and describing the sort of changes which would be
necessary to make this structure conform to the Joint Declaration.
11.
The Governor said that his basic idea was that the
Secretary of State might try to engineer an opportunity
to pass over a paper to Wu Xueqian. He might for instance,
if he succeeded in having a meeting in May, set out some
of the constraints of the British position in relation
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