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Extract from the Report dated 7th March, 1946, made by Mr. James Bertram, a New Zealander who has been stated by the Dominions office to be likely to enter the New Zealand External Service and whose views in any case are considered to carry some weight with the New Zealand
Government.
Registered in the Dominions Office.
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the issue of Hong Kong, though temporarily receding from the headlines, is far from dead. On the contrary, it is likely to be revived the sooner precisely because of the success
With that has attended the British re-occupation. the return of Civil Government, and the re-establishment of British commercial interests, a sharp rise in the prosperity of Hong Kong may be anticipated; and a correspondingly sharp twinge of jealousy on the part of the Chinese authorities -- especially the local authorities in Canton who now find themselves without a modern port equipped to deal with the potentially vast South China trade.
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It should be remembered that strikes and boycotts are not necessary on the part of the Chinese to neutralise Hong Kong economically, if they wish this: a development of a deep-water port at Whampoa, near to Canton, would achieve the same object finally and definitely. Such a project was fully planned before the Far Eastern war; it would, of course, be very expensive and "uneconomic", but it remains China 's ultimate reply to the present British port-monopoly.
The Chinese at present are naturally more concerned about Manchuria and their differences with Russia (in which they look for British as well as American support) than they are about Britain and Hong Kong. This temporary lull is being used by single-minded British officials to carry on with their local program for a reformed British Colony; and I hope I have sufficiently indicated the valid points in favour of such a program. If Hong Kong could in a short time be made not merely an efficient working economic unit, but also an area of enlightened and reasonably democratic administration in which individual and political liberties were preserved and official graft reduced to a minimum, this would be of highest importance to China as a whole in her difficult progress towards democracy. There is nothing incongruous in the suggestion that a British Colony might serve as a model of liberal democracy, to anyone acquainted with the oppressive atmosphere of Chinese politics today.
But I should like to put forward as emphatically as possible, my own private view, that whatever is done to reform British colonial government, and whatever reservations Imperial Staffs may wish to make in connexion with problems of Pacific defence, Hong Kong will have to go back to China; and the sooner this is made clear to all concerned, the better. The great moment for such a gesture was of course the end of the war with Japan; that moment was lost, and not merely lost but poisoned by diplomatic bickerings that will not be forgotten overnight. There was a good case to be made for at least temporary retention of the Colony to secure private British interests - though even that case was not made but in my view the public interest that might have been served by a spontaneous act of generosity by the British Government to a proved comrade-in-arms would have far outweighed it.
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The alternative solution that has been proposed that of the internationalisation of Hong Kong and its maintenance
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