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'ALL THE BEST"
LETTERS FROM A FEISTY MAYOR
EDWARD I KOCH
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
While I was distressed by what was taking place inside China, I was just as concerned about what might happen just beyond the Bamboo Curtain, in Hong Kong. A British crown colony since 1841, it is scheduled to revert to the People's Republic of China on June 30, 1997. Under the 1984 "One Country, Two Systems" agreement with the British, the Chinese have promised to maintain Hong Kong's capitalist system for at least fifty years.
The events in Tiananmen Square, however, caused many of Hong Kong's 5.7 million residents to have grave doubts about China's good intentions. Understandably, many expressed the desire to emigrate to Great Britain to avoid the consequences of Chinese rule. However, Prime Minister Thatcher's government publicly stated that it would not allow them to emigrate to Great Britain even though they held valid British passports.
So I wrote the following letter to Mrs. Thatcher:
I hope you and your family are well.
I am writing in reference to a report in The New York Times on June 7 concerning your government's apparent decision that "the 3.5 mil lion Chinese holders of British passports in the colony (i.c., Hong Kong) would not be granted the option of seeking refuge in Britain. I am disturbed by these comments and would urge your government to reconsider the policy.
The "thinking behind ruling out immigration," the Times cited onc of your ministers as explaining, “was that a cold, overpopulated island of 57 million people was no place for a sudden influx of Chinese from the tropics." The comment is ludicrous.
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