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to try to secure some other option than that of simply being abandoned to Communist China. These include about 5,000 (or one half) of the police, some 2,000 to 3,000 in the public service, and
the rest would be professional or semi-professional people. By no
means all of them are people to whom Government has any obligation, other than to seek some kind of "safe conduct" guarantee to enable
them to go where they wished and could get to under their own
arrangements: many, for instance, have contacts in Taiwan, the
United States, Canada and this country, and would get out under their
own arrangements provided they were not prevented from doing so,
But there are undoubtedly some, especially in the police and
Administration, to whom we are morally committed, and who would need
help. Probably a good number of them would wish to go to Taiwan, if
they could be helped to get there but would Peking ever countenance
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our helping persons of Chinese descent to get to Taiwan? It might be
necessary to contemplate bringing a fair number of hard core cases
to the U.K., pending decisions on their resettlement.
11. We asked the Governor and the C. B. F. whether there was any
contingency planning that could usefully be undertaken at this stage.
They were both categorical that this could not possibly be undertaken
in Hong Kong, or even in Singapore. Their reason is that for any
such planning to be at all meaningful a fairly wide circle of people in Hong Kong would necessarily have to be involved. This would, in
their view, entail an unacceptable risk of leakage; and they believe (we felt rightly) that if public opinion in Hong Kong once suspected
that there was contingency planning for a possible British withdrawal,
that would lead to a very serious collapse of public and police morale, with public opinion swinging right against us. This would
create a situation which the Communists would be quick to exploit,
and would probably encourage them to try an all-out confrontation.
We should then find ourselves quickly in desperate straits.
12.
To put it shortly, Sir David Trench and General Worsley believe
that there is nothing we can do at present to organise a general
withdrawal from Hong Kong, or to plan for that contingency. They
stated more than once that they believe we are trapped in Hong Kong;
and that our only possible stance for the time being is to do our
level best to stay there on our terms, frankly recognising that if
we fail we are more likely to face capitulation than the possibility of an orderly withdrawal. They feel that we have no option but to sweat it out on this basis, if we possibly can, until the post-Mao
period, in the hope that we might then get back to a less dangerous
relationship with mainland China. They both add the rider that if
we do succeed in riding out the present storm and can achieve once
again the kind of relationship which Hong Kong had with China prior
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