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Colonial Education Department has been reconstructed and,
I think, improved. Students have in the main come from
Malaya and from Hong Kong itself: few have come, since
the very early days, from interior China. Some thing more than one third of our present annual expenditure is met from a Hong Kong Government grant with the result that
nearly half of this may be regarded as a Hong Kong
contribution to the higher education of Malayan Chinese.
A University for Hong Kong colony alone
would be a grotesque extravagance, and with this development of higher education in Malaya there is a danger that in a relatively short time, this result might face us. On the
other hand we have appeals from China for the training
of doctors, engineers and teachers of English for service
in the reconstruction of China. The Generalisamo has
appealed by personal letter to the Governor for something
to be done to help them in this way and this was the
recurrent theme of his talk to me a little more than a
month ago when I spent a long evening with him.
I have been in England I have had a letter from
Mr. Chen Lih-fu, the Minister of Education, the burden
of which is precisely this, also.
It is clear to most of us who have
Since
had a chance of looking at these matters near at hand that America, whose commercial interests are trivial compared with British, has gained extraordinary prestige and influence in China because of the generous attitude of American missions, educational trusts and universities
in matters touching education. You are bound to know
as much of this as I. But Chinese friendship is of great importance to us now, and it may become even more important. We want it to be recognised in London that
the/