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17 December, 1970
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Thank you for your letter of 1 December about P'oi Chien-taang (can we agree on this spelling?)...
2. On 7 December the Chinese Office asked whother P'of. could call on me. I offered him that afternoon, but was told that ho was too tired. I suspect that this meant that he had not yet read all the briefs. He eventually came on 9 Decet ber and ho, Ma and Chiang came to dinner with us on 16 December.
3. Ma is leaving on 28 December by BEA- he has asked not to be searched. Formal notification of P'ei will bo mode to you in Peking. When I enquired whether Mr. Hoiung's name should be kept on the list, he said that he had not yet beon given instructions.
2:.. Ka said that he hoped on return to go to work in the countryside. I found P'ei lively, well informed and with a good sense of humour. He said he had three children, 19, 13 end 11, and that his wife would join him after the Sprir Festival. He had been educated at a "sort of university" at
Tsing tao.
5. In the course of our talks I left P'ei in no doubt that the main obstacle in our relations was the continuod detention of British subjects, in particular Johnston. D'ei replied at length on the usual lines. A new thene repeated on both cccauions was that the relatives of the confrontation prisoners in Hong Kong were growing indignant at their continuod &tention. Thilo not wishing to read too much into this, any change of wording is noteworthy. It could be a warning light the t popular indignation on this matter might now need to bo domon- strated in Hong Kong. On Johnston, his wording was also slightly different, in saying that "departments concerned would
in the concerned, you
aspect of Christmas and said that release by then would be particularly well received.
6.
He devoted a great deal of time to our "unsatisfactory attitude" to the Important Item Resolution, and repeated that it was a bar to any change in the level of our ropresentation. A new line on this was that he said we were breaking one of the five principles of peaceful co-existence; that relating to
J. B. Donson, Esq., 0.B.E.,
PEKING
RESTRICTED
territorial
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