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(e) an over-concentration on the relationship between any Hong Kong office and the Central Government could also have implications for the effective exercise of the HKSAR's autonomy after 1997.
on
3. From the experience of our Commercial Section the status of regional offices in Peking varies greatly. The autonomous regions - particularly Tibet and Xinjiang seem to have more authority than those of (say) Anhui and Henan. Most of the provincial offices seem to concentrate on arranging programmes and providing accommodation for their fellow provincials official business in the capital and inter alia lobbying foreign missions for visas and signs of interest in industrial or commercial exhibitions. They are usually headed by an official at Director of Department level. At one end of the scale the Anhui regional office consists of two rather small bedrooms in the back of a small hotel. Even the more important regional offices are not staffed to a very high level in their own right. There appear, however, to be seconded staff from the provincial offices of those ministries which have important connections with the centre regularly in the Beijing office. For example, there is almost always someone of Director level from the Agricultural and/or Forestry Bureau of the TAR in the Tibetan Regional office. Similarly, it is usual to find an oil and gas expert or a petrochemical expert of Director level in the Xinjiang office.
In
4. The function of the offices varies according to the province concerned, but essentially they are liaison and contact points. They book accommodation for incoming VIPS from the province. some cases, certainly with Xinjiang and Tibet, meetings are held in their offices between foreign representatives and provincial representatives. Very often the planning or preparatory office
for а major provincial project will be located in the regional office (Sichuan, Xinjiang are examples). This is as much to lobby national authorities to push forward planning approvals as to meet foreign companies. However, while they fulfil this linking role, the offices clearly do not have any authority in their own right, and the importance of their permanent staff would appear to grow with the distance of the province from Beijing and the inexperience in matters concerning central government of the provincial leadership.
5. As for how these offices are set up, we have little firm information. According to a MOFERT Contact, it is laid down in the constitution that all provinces have a right to a repres- entative office in the centre, just as all municipalities have a right to have an office in the provincial capital and so on down the line to county level. The majority of provincial offices in Beijing would presumably have been set up soon after liberation.
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