Mr.
Sidebotham.
29
I am sorry to have kept these papers for a few days. I have not, however, been idle, since I have now secured Treasury concurrence for the drafts on this file and on 54403/2/48, and subject to your approval the telegrams can now go off. Mr. Pitblado was in my room for a general discussion when the papers came across from Church House, and I therefore took the opportunity of discussing the matter with him and giving him the drafts for further study. Owing to extreme pressure of other work in the Treasury, they remained there for several days, but they have now returned and I have attached them to the files. · I hope you will not mind my having done this. It seemed the obvious way of getting Treasury concurrence in reasonably quick time.
As Mr. Wallace has shown in his minute, the position is not entirely an easy one. On the one hand, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has stipulated that the £250,000 grant by H.M.G. towards Hong Kong University should be used for "development" (i.e., in addition to the money made available by the Hong Kong Government itself) rather than for mere "rehabilitation" (which might enable the Hong Kong Government to withdraw the funds which they have provisionally allocated for this purpose and use them in other ways, thus leaving the total financial burden as regards the University to be borne by H.M.G.). This attitude springs partly, I understand, from the Chancellor's own personal desire that H.M.G.'s money should be used for development purposes and partly from an official disinclination of the Treasury to make it possible for the Hong Kong Government to "get out of" contributing towards the University those sums which they had already undertaken to grant. On the other hand, the Colonial University Grants Advisory Committee, in making preliminary, unofficial comments on an informal application submitted to them by Dr. Sloss for a further £255,000, have expressed themselves doubtful of the extent to which Hong Kong University can and should be developed in present circumstances, and have showed no inclination to support Dr. Sloss' request for a grant.
I regard the attitude of the C.U.G.A.C. on this point as entirely logical, and at the last meeting of the Committee (of which I am a member) I felt bound to speak in support of this view. The point is, I think, that within broad limits, there are two alternatives for Hong Kong University either to develop in a big way, with the explicit purpose of attracting students from all over China and adopting this as its main raison d'etre, or else not to develop at all. Hong Kong has a population of under 2,000,000, and this population is barely large enough to support a University for purely "internal" purposes, especially in view of the likelihood that those students who would have come from Malaya (a large percentage in pre-war days) will now go to the Malayan University instead. As regards the former of these alternatives, the C.U.G.A.C. felt that purposes of this kind were not proper objects for
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