Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
154
13 May 1992
The Lord Glenarthur, DL House of Lords
London
SW1A OPW
London SW1A 2AH
From The Minister of State
th Woodrow
1
Dear Señor
Thank you for your letter of 30 April about Senator McConnell's Bill on Hong Kong.
This is a subject which the Chinese have raised with us on a number of occasions recently. They are clearly quite exercised about it. The background is that after a visit to Hong Kong last year, Senator McConnell introduced a Bill designed to bolster Hong Kong's autonomy under the Joint Declaration (JD). We believe that Senator McConnell intends his Bill to be helpful to Hong Kong by showing US support for the JD. But the Chinese are suspicious that it is an attempt to internationalise the Hong Kong problem. They took particular issue with a requirement in the Bill for the US Administration to report to Congress on the implementation of the JD.
We have told the Chinese Government that we had let the US Administration and Congress know of our concerns (primarily on the reporting requirement). But there was a limit on what we could do to influence the legislature of another sovereign state. In any case it was natural that those with a major economic stake in Hong Kong, such as the US, should take an interest in developments there. Public criticism of the Bill was likely to be counterproductive and could damage Chinese interests, for example over renewal of MFN status. We have therefore urged the Chinese not to get this issue out of proportion.
I thought that you might find it helpful to have this frank account of what we have been saying to the Chinese: it might be useful as a quarry for your own response to them.
On 7 May the Senate Foreign Relations Committe dropped, with Senator McConnell's agreement, the requirement for annual reports on JD implementation. This was replaced by a call for
/reports, at