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At first sight all the essentials of the latter appear to be
We find references adequately safeguarded or preserved intact.
to the creation of an endowment fund, to the choice of railways
for
as the best field investment, and to the establishment of a
Board of Trustees which is to handle the income of the endow-
ment in accordance with the general views set forth in the
Willingdon Report. The definite allocation of £265,000 to the
University of Hong Kong and of £200,000 to the Universities
China Committee in London is something new, but by no means out
of harmony with the principles of the Report, which indeed speci-
fically included the University of Hong Kong
and also the pro-
motion of Chinese studies in Great M Britain among those
institutions and activities which deserved recognition and BSEBS
support.
But a more careful scrutiny of the agreement
reveals departures of a very serious kind from the principles
accepted by the Advisory Committee and its delegation and by
His Majesty's Government in 1926. There is to be a Board of
Trustees, but its powers and functions are not clearly defined
and in any case it is relegated to a position altogether infer-
ior to that of an entirely new body called a Purchasing Commis-
sion. The exact relationship between the Board and the Commis-
sion is left very much in doubt. It wo ld almost appear that
the Board was not taken seriously by those who were engaged in
drawing up the agreement embodied in the Exchange of Notes.
We
have indeed strong reasons for believing that the British Govern-
ment were indifferent as to whether a Board of Trustees were
created or not, and that it came into existence at the instance
of Dr C.T.Wang.
There is no mention of any part of the accumu-
lated funds being made immediately available for educational
the purposes, far less the £350,000 per annum (irrespective of ex- pected income from endowments) which forms the subject of a
special recommendation in the Report. On the contrary, the whole of the existing accumulations, and half of all future