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(although all minus the UK are probably in Seattle at the moment). They are not likely to be tempted to spend time at an academic seminar in Vancouver as cover for a separate meeting. Moreover the presence of such a bevy of senior officials would be so unusual as to arouse the suspicions of some enterprising academic or journalist at the conference. For all these reasons, we conclude that an Asia Director meeting would simply not work.
5. If Higginbotham's particular concern was to enable his new Ministers to be given authoritative and updated briefing on Hong Kong, perhaps we would do better to focus on bilateral ways of bringing Canadian officials more fully into the picture. We brief the Canadians regularly and thoroughly in London, and no doubt you do the same in Hong Kong. But high-level contacts between capitals are relatively rare. If you think it would help we could certainly suggest that a senior Canadian official responsible for Asia should travel via Europe when he next visits his parish and stop off in London for talks. Alternatively it might be possible for one of us to go to Ottawa, perhaps combining the visit with talks in Washington.
6. If, on the other hand, it is the multilateral discussion to which Higginbotham attaches importance, the options strike us as limited. A discussion at a less senior official level might be possible to arrange, but in practice would run into most of the problems identified above for Asia Directors the difficulty of getting busy officials in one place at one time, the lack of plausible cover and the risk of publicity which would complicate all our relations with China.
7. All this brings us back to the rather unimaginative conclusion that the best forum for such discussions would probably be among officials posted in Hong Kong. You have there the expertise, the opportunity and the cover. I appreciate that this is not very much different from what you already do. But I wonder if you could find ways of making your contacts more of an occasion and giving them a higher profile for reporting back to capitals. One possible way of doing this might be through bringing in senior members of the Hong Kong Government, and perhaps giving the occasions some form of post-APEC label.
8.
Let's discuss this when we are all in Peking later in the week.
/Postscript
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