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all organised by the pro-1988 group. Nearly 170 public opinion polls were conducted.
The Chinese reaction
7.
These activities did not go on in isolation. China played an increasing role in the months immediately following the publication of the Green Paper. I have recorded separately the growing Chinese concern about constitutional change in Hong Kong and their fears about what they saw as British plots to perpetuate its influence beyond 1997. Besides mobilising their supporters in Hong Kong, the Chinese made a number of public comments which produced an outcry in Hong Kong; and their unpublicised diplomatic interventions strained relations between the British Government and Peking.
8.
In April, DENG Xiaoping made some well-publicised remarks which appeared to cast doubt on the introduction of direct elections not just in 1988 but even thereafter. In June, a senior official of the Hong Kong and Macao Office of the State Council, LI Hou, was quoted in a China-controlled journal as saying that the introduction of direct elections in 1988 would contravene the spirit of the Joint Declaration apparently a direct attack on the Hong Kong Government for saying that all options, including direct elections in 1988, were real ones. The public outcry and, I hope, comments conveyed by us privately to the Chinese, led to a withdrawal of this statement. But a good deal of damage had been done. China was seen in Hong Kong as interfering. The British and Hong Kong Governments were seen by many as being weak and unable to resist such interference.
9.
In official contacts the Chinese position was stated with equal clarity and a good deal of force. Constitutional change in Hong Kong should await the passing of the Basic Law in 1990; there should be no direct elections in 1988; and the British should give an assurance that, whatever was said by the people of Hong Kong, there would be no move to direct elections in 1988.
10. Some of the Chinese concerns were alleviated when you, Sir, personally assured the leader of the Chinese side of the Joint Liaison Group in July that direct elections would not be introduced in 1988 if there was
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