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FOREIGN SECRETARY:
But
I think they are suspicious, I think they are suspicious that Hong Kong with its present free institutions might turn into something which encourages change in China of a kind they do not like. two systems in one country Deng Xiaoping's phrase means that Hong Kong and China can keep separate characters within the same country and that must be sensible.
INTERVIEWER:
Are the Chinese not also suspicious that you are trying to keep, by fixing the legislature, a/toehold in Hong Kong?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
But that does not work like that, fixing the legislature, fixing. What we are fixing is/for more and more of the legislature to be chosen by the people of Hong Kong, steadily move on, upwards so that more and more people are directly elected and the other constituencies, the functional constituencies, go wider and wider and include more people, that is the reverse of fixing, it is unfixing.
INTERVIEWER:
Can I go back to my suggestion earlier that the final decision lies with Peking and put to you that Lu Ping's provisional working committee is actually meeting today to decide on the form that the legislature will take once the British have left in 1997, that is the reality, is it not, he is actually sitting down with his officials now deciding how they are going to run the colony?
FOREIGN SECRETARY:
Yes, and one thing he will be asking himself is what effect it will have on the world, on Hong Kong, on China's prosperity, if one of the first things the Chinese do, as the Chinese flag goes up over Hong Kong, is to chase out people, not appointed by the Governor, not appointed by the colonial administration, elected by the people of Hong Kong. That is something worth considering.