01 633 0920
AGE.027
24 MAY '89 19:52 FROM COI TECH RADIO
TRANSCRIPT I
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SELECT COMITTER OF HONG KONG
24 MAY 1989
11
KR TED ROWLANDS:
Minister, if I could just take you back to first
principles. Can you give the Committee any other historic
examples where a government and a Parliament has actually
transferred the sovereignty and the nationality
potentially of the future of millions of people to a
foreign power?
IR RENTON:
a great
I think Mr Rowlands, I realise you have
Kr
history in this area as Minister for the Dependent
Territories yourself a few years back. But it is not
really, the problem is not as you state, is it?
As the Foreign Secretary made very clear when he
gave evidence to your Committee, the fact of the matter is
that in Hong Kong, 92 percent approximately of the land
is only held under lease from mainland China, a lease
which expires in the middle of 1997.
Therefore, it is not to that extent a transfer of
sovereignty, it is actually recognising, as the Foreign
Secretary pointed out and as we all know well, a fact of
life that the lease ends in mid-1997 and I think there has
always been a common acceptance, certainly since I first
went to Bong Kong in the mid-1960s a5 a businessman,
the rest of Hong Kong, particularly Hong Kong island and
part of the Kowloon peninsular, was not viable as an
that