Sent
#*K 13/17
SECRET AND PERSONAL
19th February, 1969.
1 know I ought to have written much sooner than this to thank you for your personal letter of 30th December. The trouble has been a severe bout of flu (not your local variety, but our own Chipstead strain, which for sheer virulence I would back against yours any day), followed very shortly thereafter by a sudden and quite unexpected
visit I had to make to the Balamas,
2. Your letter was read here with the greatest of interest. It is this kind of personal appreciation which conveys to us so clearly the flavor and savour of things in the Colony, and just caps off in the right way the flow of information that comes to us in the ordinary course of our business with Ing Kong.
3.
We note with pride and pleasure that Hong Kong goes from strength to strength on the economic front: I never cease to marvel at what four million hard-working people have done and are still doing. So much so that countries many times its size make no bones about the fact that they regard the Colony as an increasingly formidable trade rival. Unfortunately, fresee greater difficulties for Hong Kong's trade as "injured" countries have resort to restraint arrangements. Furthermore, on present indications, fear of Hong Kong competition looks like producing a powerful lobby in favour of the Colony's exclusion from any OFCD preferences scheme for the under-developed territories; we shall shortly be consulting
you on wh: t can be done obo t this. 4. n the political front, I am quite sure you are right in saying that the Communist press and their programme of educational expansion present the most intransigent problems facing us at the moment. Looking at the scene from this distance, one gets the impression that the latter is the more dangerous of the two; this may be because, again as we see it from here, it appears that the general
Bir David Trench, G., C., Hung Kon
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