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Enclo. No. 1.
discussion the Cantonese authorities pressed me to allow
a Cantonese merchant to be appointed as "Commercial Agent
in charge of the Chinese Telegraph Office in Hong Kong",
and I agreed that this might be done upon two conditions
namely:-
(a) that the Chinese merchant appointed should be
persona grata to the Hong Kong Government, and
(b) that he should be in fact a merchant and not an
official.
The English version of the proposed title was agreed to on
the spot and the Chinese translation of the title was
reserved for careful consideration. The Cantonese
authorities also made it quite clear that they were
prepared to nominate a commercial man acceptable to the Hong Kong Government.
3.
However, on the morning of the 16th March,
as I have already informed you, Marshal Li left Hong Kong
for Shanghai, and ever since then there has been a marked
reluctance on the part of his locum tenens at Canton to
take any definite action in political matters, pending
the Marshal's return. Nevertheless in order to carry
out the agreement made with Marshal Li, I wrote on the
20th March the letter, of which 1 attach a copy, to his
Majesty's Consul-General at Canton, enquiring whom the
Canton Government proposed to nominate as Comercial
Agent in charge of the Chinese Telegraph Office in Hong
Kong, when he might be expected to arrive in Hong Kong, and setting out the proposed Chinese title. I availed myself of this opportunity to observe that the Canton
Government