CONFIDENTIAL
Americans thought it right for them to be repatriated.
4. Of the 54,000 boat people in Hong Kong, some 11,000 are refugees and are eligible to be resettled in the West. We hope that most of them will either be permanently resettled or moved to a temporary refugee reprocessing centre at Bataan in the Philippines by the end of this year, thus relieving pressure on boat people accommodation in Hong Kong.
Chinese attitude
5. The Chinese have consistently made clear that they expect us to have resolved the problem of Vietnamese boat people by 1997. But a key element in solving this problem is to prevent Vietnamese transitting China en route to Hong Kong, many of them travelling by boat along the South China coast. In addition to the so called
problem of coast hopping, an increasingly large number of Vietnamese now travel through China over land, often by local bus, and only make the final stage of the journey by boat. When the Governor of Hong Kong was in Peking in January, Premier Li Peng assured him that the Chinese Government was willing to help with this problem. We are now providing the Chinese on a regular basis with full details of the routes being used to reach Hong Kong.
CONFIDENTIAL