14-JUL-1993
14:39
Gallagher
TRANSCRI PT MR ALASTAIR GOODLAD
0491 579838
P. 19
SELECT COMMITTEE
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14 JULY 93
- 19
MR HARRIS:
There must be, as you indicated, a practical deadline over the holding of the elections, particularly the District Board ones in 1994, unless they are to be postponed, can you say what that practical deadline is?
MR GOODĽAD:
There will obviously have to be an end, but as I said earlier, we do not think that it is going to be helpful to the progress of the talks to publicly announce deadlines, so if you will forgive me, I will continue to hold that position.
MR SUMBERG:
You talked about economic progress, what worries me about this whole situation is that here we have a piece of territory presided over by this country in a benign way, we are one of the great democracies, proposing to hand it over in 1997 to the nation which participated in the butchering in Tiananmen Square. I cannot get away from that personally and Mr Jopling read out the extract from the previous committee's report where a few months before the Chinese officials were taking a benign view. How confident are you, post-1997, not so much on the economy, that the civil rights and the freedoms that the Hong Kong people have will survive? And if you were a resident of Hong Kong would you have the confidence to want to remain there or if you could to leave and get out to the West, wherever that would be?
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