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Hong Kong, which posed a problem for the textile exports of France, Germany and especially Italy. He asked what Mr. Rippon thought about it.
12. Mr. Rippon said that we had noticed a certain hostility to Hong Kong in the Community: the idea seemed to be it was a rich tax-free haven existing on sweated labour flooding the world market with poor quality goods. M. Schumann interjected that his constituents in Lille certainly had this idea. Mr. Rippon said that some people in the Duchy of Lancaster thought the same way. But it was simply no longer true. It was not yet understood that Hong Kong was vulnerable politically and perhaps also commer-
It had little raw materials. home cially.
He might describe its position in the words once used by Mr. MacMillan about the British economy as "brilliant but precarious". We needed to find Ways of mitigating the effects on Hong Kong of lost preferences, or worse facing the possibility of the imposition of reverse preferences. The worst thing for Hong Kong would be its exclusion from the scheme of generalized preferences: he hoped that the Community would include it in their list of beneficiaries. It seemed anomalous to
discriminate against Hong Kong in relation to other South-East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Korea (both of which had lower wages) or Singapore. 13.
M. Schumann said he did not exclude the
extension of the generalized preference scheme to Hong Kong but it might still need special
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