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had already been covered years before with sympathy and understanding and, it may be said, with more courteous cogency than in the often bland later green papers and documents.
It may be asserted that the time had not been ripe and that circumstances had since changed. Certainly those who in 1967 would have overseen implementation of change were likely to have lacked conviction: they had made way for others a decade later. Speculation is without profit, and it was quite arguable that the breathing space after the 1966-67 troubles was no time for experimentation with public participation as opposed to palliatory public wooing. Yet what Dickinson had hoped to see devolved to Hong Kong's man in the street and paddy field was an involvement in almost every public service that most such men and women cared about, for so long as external interference was avoidable and 1997 seemed distant. Such men and women were too wise to wish to meddle with international affairs; and they believed that trade and commerce benefited from minimal government interference, other than protection from artificial foreign barriers. It is nevertheless tempting to wonder whether a successful introduction of what his working party advised, despite the apparent fault-lines exposed by members' temporising reservations, might not have met every recurrent informed criticism of the unrepresentative nature of what is after all a mighty trading municipality rather than a minor nation state; and have anticipated and forestalled some of what less well-informed or prejudiced observers have seen as hasty and belated attempts to make up for lost time in giving self-respect and a sense of identity to a remarkable and great, but only recently consolidated, community. It must not be forgotten that it has only been in the three decades that have followed Dickinson's Report that the population did become stable, permanently resident, and conscious of its identity. Once Country Two Systems might well have found his foresight admirably appropriate.
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NOTES
· Government Printer, Hong Kong, March 1967
2C/ Local Government Commission Regulations under UK Local Government Act 1958