54145/47
Secret
Aned (130)
Colonial Office, Church House,
Great Smith Street,
S.W.1.
15th September, 1947.
126
of
You have already had direct from Sir R. Stevenson copies of two confidential letters which he wrote to Kitson, the Foreign Office, Nos. S/0/513 and S/0/544 of the 24th June and 3rd July respectively, reporting conversations between Sir R. Stevenson and the Portuguese Ambassador in Nanking concerning Macao. I think therefore you will be interested to see the enclosed copy of Kitson's reply to Sir R. Stevenson of the 17th July, which I am sending to you with the concurrence of the Foreign Office. Kitson, incidentally, has now left the Foreign Office.
2.
I think you should also know that, on receiving a copy of Kitson's letter, I felt obliged to comment on two passages which I felt might give rise to misunderstanding. The first of these passages is in paragraph 2 of Kitson's letter where it is stated that Mr. Bevin recently persuaded Mr. Creech Jones to agree to defer for the present the "reassuring statement" " which we had been wanting to make about Hong Kong, and which the Foreign Office felt would seem gratuitously provocative to the Chinese at a time when they are in no position to do anything about it. You will no doubt have heard from Sir Alexander Grantham, with whom we discussed the position at length before his departure, of the decision to postpone for the present the question of making such a statement. It was, however, our understanding that the main reason for the postponement was not that China was in no position to take any action, but that the statement was likely to give rise to actual difficulties for His Majesty's Government in the field of international relations. I made this point to Kitson, and the Foreign Office have now agreed with my comment. They have added that a further reason was that Mr. Bevin was inclined to question whether any statement would serve to reassure the Chinese in Hong Kong as to our ability to withstand pressure from China designed to undermine our position in the Colony.
3.
The second comment I made related to the reference in the last paragraph but two of Kitson's letter to the decision "not to pursue for the time being, and until we can see more clearly what is going to happen in China, the proposal to seek from Ministers a decision on future policy in regard to Hong Kong". So far as we could see from our records there was never any decision here to defer this question until we can see more clearly what was going to happen in China. That might, in fact, involve postponement for quite a long time. I therefore pointed out to Kitson that our understanding was, as indeed we made clear to Sir Alexander Grantham before he left, that the decision was to defer the question for the time being without any particular indication as to when the matter might be brought up again. The Foreign Office have agreed that this does in fact represent the position.
There is a third point dealt with in Kitson's letter, namely the question of consultation with the Portuguese Government about Hong Kong and Macao. The views expressed in the third paragraph of Kitson's letter are those of the Foreign Office, and if you have any views on the question we should certainly be glad to have them. The Foreign Office have told us that the last thing they want to do is to get too closely involved with the Portuguese over Macao. As you probably know,
D. M. MACDOUGALL, ESQ., C.M.G.
the
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