TNAG-0142-FCO40-178-Long-term-policy-on-International-trade-in-textiles-1969 — Page 72

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wedded to trying to conclude comprehensive bilateral

arrangements with the main Asian suppliers, starting with

Japan, but they might be brought round to agreeing to the selective approach. I explained what had happened at the U.S./Hong Kong bilateral talks and also what I knew of the current Japanese position, e.g., that they would be willing

to discuss American problems on a selective basis but would

wish to do so within a multilateral forum. I thought that

the key to the whole situation really lay with the attitude

the Japanese would finally adopt and that, in the meantime,

there was nothing which we could do except to wait. As far as Hong Kong was concerned, the ball was now back in the

American court, I explained the difficulty in using the selective approach with the Americans, i.e., that they did not really have a case against Hong Kong on any product at all

comparable with the sort of cases we had conceded to, e.g., Sweden. Norway or Canada. The danger was, therefore, that

the criteria for voluntary restraint would be driven down and that this would open the doar to further requests from other countries on bad cases.

11. From further conversation it appeared that the textiles side of the Secretariat, at least, preferred that any GATT discussion on American non-cotton problems should in some way be linked to the Cotton Textiles Committee. I said that this would not be unattractive from Hong Kong's point of view. The outcome we wished to avoid was the broadening of the

discussion te include products other than textiles with the possibility of restrictive action against Hong Kong's exports in such products. If in the end it was not possible to keep cotton textiles sui generis then it was imperative that at

least textiles as such should be kept sui generis. From

reading between the lines it seemed to me that Salib, and

/perhaps

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