5.
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機密
Insofar as practice is concerned, we are not aware of the Chinese ever having declined to accept the legitimacy of the British citizenship of any Chinese carrying a British passport giving full right of abode. It was expressly accepted in the case of Eric Ho. There have been other cases involving Hong Kong persons married to staff at the British Embassy in Peking where the Chinese have not questioned our right to transform a BDTC passport into a British passport and have treated the recipient of the latter as British from that point.
6.
This attitude has however prevailed under circumstances where China considered that the granting of large numbers of British citizen passports to Hong Kong people was unlikely. Qian Qichen made this very clear' in the context of his statement that the granting of British citizenship was an internal affair of the British Government. He immediately added:
7.
"Britain clearly does not want to permit too many people to acquire British citizenship."
There have been indications in the left-wing press in Hong Kong that granting of British citizenship on a large scale might make China dopt a different attitude, and indeed one that might be sad to be more in keeping with the theory of the Chinese Nationality Law.
8.
An Article in Da Gong Bao of 22 October argued that those who are classified as "Hong Kong Chinese compatriots" in the Chinese Memorandum associated with the Joint Declaration and who receive British citizen passports prior to 1997 but do not settle abroad will be regarded as Chinese by the PRC. The Da Gong Bao article pointed out that Hong Kong has always been part of China and that residence here cannot be regarded as "settlement abroad", a requirement under Article 9
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