to questions specifically concerned with the need for broadcasting to China, the intention which it is desired to disguise seems to have secured an initial advantage over the fiction which it is desired to create. Evon if agreement with the Hong Kong Government on all essential arrangements had already been reached and there were no longer any need for reticence on the score of uncertainty, it would still be difficult, if not impossible, to make any satisfactory public statement of intention. Unless their co-operation is secured, those who are pressing for a broadcasting service to China from Hong Kong will either accopt statements about an increase in the power of the domestic service as satisfying their contention, which would be damaging to the ostensibly domestic purpose of the increase, or they will take the development of the domestic service at its face value and continuo to press for a service intended for China. Either course would be embarrassing.
9.
Nor does it seem certain that the co-operation necessary to avoid these issues from being pressed
ould be readily forthcoming, if sought, for the proposals under consideration are likely to be very much more modest than those which some Members and others have in mind. Mr. Fletcher, for example, in the debate on 5th May, spoke of "an enormous increase in the power and the staff of the Hong Kong radio station" and "the development of the radio in Hong Kong" as "the vory first priority
of all the measures
to swing the people of China away from Communism" (Hansard, 5th May, Col.1282). This clearly supposes a coverage of most if not all of China, rather than of a small segment of the extreme south-west, a development which, using medium-waves, would require a transmitter of ten or more times the power of the 7 Kilowatt transmitters proposed.
10.
There could, of course, be no disguising the real purpose of so powerful a transmitter in Hong Kong, nor would it be likely that it could be obtained and installed within the one or two years which are expected to be required to bring the high-power short- wave station in Johore into operation. Even if, therefore, there were no longer any need for dissimulation, there would be no advantage in establishing in Hong Kong a medium-wave transmitter of such power, subject to delay of this order, unless either (a) the contention is admitted that it has become necessary to broadcast from Hong Kong, in addition to Malaya, owing to Hong Kong's unique political, cultural and geographical relationship to China, or (b) it is now considered necessary, as a long- term policy, to broadcast to China from some source on medium-waves, in addition to short-waves.
11.
To sum up, an attempt is at present being maûc to give to the project for a modest increase in the power of the existing medium-wave service in Hong Kong a double face, one side for the Chinese, the other for the British public. This could only serve its purpose if each public could be prevented indefinitely from seeing
/the