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Paper, including direct elections.
The British Government
assumed that the draft of the Basic Law would cover these
same points amongst many others.
5. Right at the end of our conversation Miss Lau said she
had heard that we had handed over papers to the Chinese on
this subject. Was this true? I said that, to this and all
similar questions about our communications with the Chinese
Government, she would find that I responded with "neither
confirm nor deny", even if speaking unattributably. I was
not going to get into the position of discussing the form or
nature of our discussions with the Chinese Government.
Finally, as she was leaving, she said that Ke Zaishuo at his
press reception on 25 July had said (presumably in conversation with her alone) that the Chinese had been glad to get a range of options from the British. I did not pursue the subject.
6.
In addition to these exchanges, which took up only a relatively small part of the conversation, we discussed the usual topics. On "accountability" I said there had been some informal exchanges with the Chinese, but not at the JLG meetings. There had been no secret agreement on the subject during the Hong Kong negotiations. In our view it was a broad
concept. Nothing was to be gained by trying to pin it down to
a dictionary, or lawyers', definition. Li Hou seemed tohave
described some of the main elements, although he had included a point about impeachment which did not seem to me personally to be an essential element of accountability. I did not myself think it would be useful for the British side to try to produce
a public definition of the term. In answer to her questions, I said that, in my view, EXCO was at present "accountable" to LEGCO; but this did not mean that the precise present relation- ship between the two had to be preserved in aspic up to and beyond 1997. It was important in this, as in other points, to take account of the fact that a political organism was a living body; it had to be given room to develop.
7. On EXCO appointments Miss Lau made the same criticisms as she had to the Minister. She added that she had been surprised that the Minister had been unresponsive about the need to develop political leaders in Hong Kong. I said she should
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