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CHAN KIT-CHENG
Office's wish. The Far Eastern division in the department believed that "the sympathy of the American public would lie almost entirely with China and would be strongly critical of this Government,”32 The American government was fortunately spared the embarrassment of having to reject the British request in that the Chinese, for some still unknown reasons, agreed on 31 December not to raise the question of the New Territories in connexion with the extraterritoriality treaty.33 Under the changed circumstance, Lord Halifax, British ambassador to Washington, was given to understand that the American government would have been prepared to indicate its displeasure had China been obstinate over the inclusion of the New Territories in the treaty.34 The interesting question remains as to what attitude the United States would have adopted had China requested her support.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Pacific Relations was actively preparing for a conference to be held at Mont Tremblent in the United States at the beginning of December. The conference attracted the serious attention of all those countries concerned with Pacific affairs because of the increasingly wide publicity enjoyed by the Institute since Pearl Harbour through its large publishing programme of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. From late spring onwards, earnest preparations for attending the conference were made by Chatham House, the British national council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, together with the Foreign Office which, despite its earlier apprehension of "the risk of a lot of washing of dirty linen in public' ”, had now decided to make full use of the conference as a platform from which Britain could educate the American opinion about the British empire. From the beginning the Foreign Office was alive to the danger that the question of Hong Kong would arouse great attention at the conference. However, it was decided that the British delegation would not be briefed on Hong Kong because it was feared that the idea of returning Hong Kong on terms after the war, a point the British government had conceded after much painful inter-departmental consultation and deliberation, would be badly received by the Americans and Chinese who would denounce anything short of an outright retrocession,35
The Chinese delegation was equally well prepared. Pressure coming from the Chinese delegates, who explicitly expressed their desire for Hong Kong, was so intense that Sir John Pratt, the British delegate charged with the duty to speak on China, Japan, and