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A R Paul Esq
Head of Hong Kong Department Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Whitehall
London SW1
$2)
(52)
69
BRITISH TRADE COMMISSION
HONG KONG.
12 July 1989
pa
14/8
Dear Alan
The Chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) of Hong Kong, Mrs Ophelia Cheung Macpherson, is by now in London and I understand is likely to address the Royal Commonwealth Society there on the nationality issue in a week or two's time. She has circulated all members of the Council of the RCS in Hong Kong saying that it was me who suggested that she should talk to the RCS in London. I should therefore explain that that is not exactly the case. She and - the Society's Deputy Chairman in Hong Kong called on me recently, and she told
me then that she was shortly going to London and that she planned to devote half of each day while there calling on people, writing letters to the press and MPs, giving speeches where possible, and generally seeking support on the nationality and passport issue. I simply asked whether this would include speaking at the RCS, to which she replied that she had not yet arranged this but was considering it.
2. In any event Ophelia Cheung will tell a good story.
She has described to me in graphic detail how her grandfather, as a wealthy land owner in China at the time of the Communist take over, was stripped and forced to kneel in his home town square, without food and water, until he died three days later, and that this is the sort of repression that she and others need to insure against by having a passport giving them the right to live elsewhere.
3. You know the personalities of Hong Kong better than I yet do, and you probably know Ophelia Cheung. She is a lively, articulate and invariably very well dressed lady. She is married to a Scotsman who has been some 26 years in Hong Kong and who is Secretary General of the Planning Committee for the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and was formerly Secretary for Transport here. She is an active and enthusiastic Chairman of the RCS.
ever
Jous
Peler
P W Heap
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