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technical details such as the financing of the massive airport
project. More broadly, other than the institute that directly
serves the Office, there are no research institutes in China
devoted to Hong Kong affairs.
Possibly because of these factors from time to time the
negotiations tend to get held up and log jams develop until,
either because of an injection of urgency from above or due to
the need to meet an arbitrary deadline, a whole series of often
complex matters incorporating difficult details have to be
decided quickly under stressful almost crisis conditions. Two
examples may be cited to illustrate the tendency: In order to
meet Deng Xiaoping's September 1984 deadline for the completion
of the negotiations for the Joint Declaration both delegations
had to work virtually non-stop for days on end until a
satisfactory wording was finally agreed at the last moment. Since
the British side were the better prepared in advance with
detailed documentation on legal and other technical details some
of the wording in the agreed final document has turned out to be
somewhat embarrassing to the Chinese even though the general
structure of the Joint Declaration reflects their original
negotiating position. Thus China's spokesmen hardly ever refer
to the commitment to retain "unchanged" the "life-style" of Hong
Kong, but they repeatedly proclaim the necessity of upholding
"stability and prosperity". Similarly, since the differences
erupted over Tiananmen the negotiations in the Joint Liaison
Group have made little or no
technical, but important
progress. A whole series of
matters
are
being held-up without